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State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This work brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa's police forces.
Jan Beek’s book explores everyday police work in an African country and analyses how police officers, despite prevailing stereotypes about failed states and African police, produce stateness. Drawing on highly readable ethnographic descriptions, the book shows that Ghanaian police practices often involve the exchange of money (bribes), the use of violence and the influence of politicians. However, such informal practices allow police officers to deal with the inconsistent necessities and the social context of their work. Ultimately, Ghanaian police officers are also inspired by a bureaucratic ethos and their practices are guided by it. Stateness, the book argues, is a quality of organizations, gradually emerging out of such everyday encounters. Producing Stateness allows a close look at the realities of police work in Africa and provides surprising insights into the rationalities of policing and state bureaucracies everywhere.
How the problematic behavior of private citizens—and not just the police force itself—contributes to the perpetuation of police brutality and institutional racism “Warning: Neighborhood Watch Program in Force. If I don’t call the police, my neighbor will!” Signs like this can be found affixed to telephone poles on streets throughout the US, warning trespassers that the community is an active participant in its own policing efforts. Thijs Jeursen calls this phenomenon, in which individuals take on the responsibility of defending themselves and share with the police the duty to mitigate everyday insecurity, “vigilant citizenship.” Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork in Miami an...
"This book explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in a rural community in Niger and also addresses the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic forms and peoples' lives"--
An ethnographic study of issues of land rights, property regimes, and ethnicity in West Africa. Focusing on an area of the savannah in northern Ghana and southwestern Burkina Faso, Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa explores how rural populations have secured, contested, and negotiated access to land and how they have organized their communities despite being constantly on the move as farmers or migrant laborers. Carola Lentz seeks to understand how those who claim native status hold sway over others who are perceived to have come later. As conflicts over land, agriculture, and labor have multiplied in Africa, Lentz shows how politics and power play decisive roles in determining ac...
Rethinking the contributions of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology for political ethnography, the Politics of Relations elaborates its relational approach to the state along four interlaced axes of research – embeddedness, boundary work, modalities and strategic selectivity – that enable thick comparisons across spatio-temporal scales of power. In Serbia local experiences of self-government, infrastructure and care motivate its citizens to “become the state” while cursing it heartily. While both officials and citizens strive for a state that enables a “normal life,” they navigate the increasingly illiberal politics enacted by national parties and which are tolerated by trans-national donors.
The book focuses on volatile processes at the South African-Zimbabwean border that arise from practices of migration and income generating activities. The processes are influenced by neoliberal developments and controversial discourses on migration, commercial sexual services, and human trafficking. In this unstable environment, different actors continuously negotiate, trying to achieve stable positions. By addressing issues related to migration and income generating activities, they maneuver between legal rules and their own moral values and interests. In their attempt to classify incidents in the border context that are unclear to them, actors’ explanations are partly based on the concep...
In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.
In ihrer Ethnografie der UNESCO-Verhandlungen zum Schutz der kulturellen Vielfalt beleuchtet Ulrike Niedner-Kalthoff die vielfältigen Prozeduren der Entscheidungsfindung im postnationalen Zeitalter. Sie zeigt, welche Rolle Technologien der Macht in Verhandlungen spielen und wie »kulturelle Vielfalt« durch hegemoniales Wissen erst hergestellt wird. Diplomatische Praktiken – von der Konstruktion eines Themas über dessen Verhandlung und Mobilisierung bis zur Repräsentation – werden einer detaillierten Analyse unterzogen und in der Diskussion um Global Governance und Gouvernementalität verortet. Damit liefert das Buch einen zentralen Beitrag zur Anthropologie der Diplomatie und der Staatlichkeit im 21. Jahrhundert.
This volume offers insights from political anthropology on how to analyze and how to think about contemporary areas of internationalized political phenomena in a fresh manner. By drawing on a variety of cases like policing, budgeting, the role of monetary politics in everyday life, development agencies, and international organisations it shows the promise of an “extended experience” for the study of international politics, yet without glossing over the limits of such approaches. This book is an essential contribution to the discussion about ethnography in international relations and a bridge between disciplines.