Because policing has been treated as a project of political ordering and disordering, it allows for the retention and abuse for colonial frameworks.
‘All Policing is Political’
Zoha Waseem at Dawn: I read these words some time ago while exploring the works of Professor Martha Huggins, a celebrated critical criminologist who has written extensively about policing, police violence and repression in Latin America and beyond. In Political Policing, Huggins writes: “All policing is political, ranging on a continuum from police being very visible handmaids of organized power … to their relationship to power being obscured by the ideologies of democracy and social control that claim to make police merely extensions of a class-neutral state and the ‘people’”…
In this article, I explore the nexus between policing and politics in Pakistan, unpacking some of the ways in which policing has consistently and undeniably been a ‘politicized’ project…
With Pakistan’s politics in flux, elections seemingly around the corner, and each center of power increasingly nervous about the legitimacy of their authority, it’s a good time to look back at how policing (as a range of practices performed by an assemblage of institutions) has been central to politics in this country, and the unending, relentless encroachment and abuse by state elites into matters of policing, coercion, and domestic security…
Political entrepreneurialism
In their recent academic publication on policing in Bangladesh, scholars David Jackman and Mathilde Maitrot discuss police officers’ dependency on clientelist relations with politicians as a form of ‘political entrepreneurialism’, defined as officers ‘seeking status through the political machinery, beyond formal bureaucratic constraints’…There is no dearth of entrepreneurial officers here…
ALSO: Are the Police demographically representative of those whom they serve?
Patronage has been a key component of contemporary policing in large parts of the world. As Kai Shing Wong writing on political patronage of the police in Thailand suggests, political patronage ‘permeates the administration and operation of the police organization … provides protection for police officers who are involved in corruption,’ and, resultantly, police work and practice risks becoming ‘biased towards the private and partisan interests of their patrons with the police enforcing laws selectively’…
Police officers thus internalize the fact that creating and maintaining patronage networks and alliances can offer protection from unfair disciplinary practices and punishment…
Writing on policing in Nigeria, Oliver Owen describes this process as ‘strategic navigation’. In other words, police officers build these informal networks with both state and private elite in attempts to help them navigate institutional constraints around prestigious and lucrative postings and appointments… More here.
FEATURED VIDEO
Honorary contributors to DesPardes: Adil Khan, Ajaz Ahmed, Anwar Abbas, Arif Mirza, Aziz Ahmed, Bawar Tawfik, Dr. Razzak Ladha, Dr. Syed M. Ali, G. R. Baloch, Haseeb Warsi, Hasham Saddique, Jamil Usman, Jawed Ahmed, Ishaq Saqi, Khalid Sharif, Majid Ahmed, Masroor Ali, Md. Ahmed, Md. Najibullah, Mushtaq Siddiqui,, Mustafa Jivanjee, Nusrat Jamshed, Shahbaz Ali, Shahid Hamza, Shahid Nayeem, Shareer Alam, Syed Ali Ammaar Jafrey, Syed Hamza Gilani, Shaheer Alam, Syed Hasan Javed, Syed M. Ali, Tahir Sohail, Tariq Chaudhry, Usman Nazir
