Beyond Agamben: Sovereignty, policing and ‘permissive space’ in South Africa, and beyond
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616680704 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Author | Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480616680704
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(1) 22 –41
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480616680704
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Beyond Agamben: Sovereignty,
policing and ‘permissive space’
in South Africa, and beyond
Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock
University of Edinburgh, UK
Abstract
The work of Giorgio Agamben has been widely used by criminologists and others to
explore policing and sovereignty across the globe. In this article, I explore Agamben’s
conceptual framework, focusing on the commonly deployed ideas of ‘state of exception’
and ‘homo sacer’. I highlight the limitations of Agamben’s legalistic theories, and argue
that they leave us with an impoverished understanding of how sovereignty is negotiated
in everyday life. As I demonstrate, scholars who have attempted to adapt Agamben’s
ideas have failed to overcome these limitations in his analysis. I conclude that we must
look for new ways forward and introduce the concept of ‘permissive space’ as an
alternative to Agamben’s theoretical framework: an idea that allows a more nuanced
and comprehensive analysis. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork in Durban, South
Africa, I illustrate the utility of this terminology for our analysis of policing.
Keywords
Agamben, everyday life, police and policing, South Africa, sovereignty
Across the social sciences, there is a growing recognition that ‘policing […] is very
much more than what the police do’ (Baker, 2008: 230). The practice of maintaining law,
order and security is performed by a wide range of actors and organizations, who use a
broad spectrum of strategies to achieve their varying visions of good conduct. The
Corresponding author:
Sarah-Jane Cooper-Knock, Lecturer in International Development, University of Edinburgh, 15a George
Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, UK.
Email: sj.cooperknock@ed.ac.uk
680704TCR0010.1177/1362480616680704Theoretical CriminologyCooper-Knock
research-article2017
Article
Cooper-Knock 23
relative importance of the state police within this ‘policing landscape’ (Marks and Wood,
2007) is something that must be proven, rather than assumed (Johnston and Shearing,
2009). Consequently, it is encouraging to see an increasing number of studies into the
‘policing organizations’ and the more ephemeral, less-structured ‘policing formations’
responsible for ‘everyday policing’ across the globe (Buur and Jensen, 2004: 143).1
By tackling questions of order and control, these studies speak to the heart of debates
around sovereignty. In their attempt to better understand the dynamics of sovereignty at
play, many have drawn on the work of Giorgio Agamben, and his concepts of the ‘state
of exception’ and ‘homo sacer’ (e.g. Buur, 2003; DeChaine, 2012; Kirsch, 2010; Kirsch
and Gratz, 2010: 5; Rhodes, 2005). However, having provided a critical reading of
Agamben, I argue that this reliance is unproductive, for two key reasons. First, Agamben’s
work is undermined by his undifferentiated, legalistic approach. While he claims to be
correcting or supplementing the work of Michel Foucault, his work ultimately represents
the state-centric, uni-dimensional analysis of power that Foucault critiqued. This, in turn,
closes any space for exploring the political contestation at the heart of questions of sov-
ereignty. Second, attempts to make Agamben’s terminology applicable to analyses of de
facto sovereignty have proved unfruitful because they encourage us to gloss over what is
analytically of most interest: how do people negotiate (with state actors and others) this
ability to exercise illegal violence without repercussion when a legal framework support-
ing state sovereignty is formally in place? What relationships, rights, and resources can
those who are accused of criminality draw upon inside or outside the corridors of the
state power to protect themselves against such violence? In this article, I suggest that
instead of utilizing the decisionist language of ‘exception’ we engage in the notion of
‘permissive space’, which gives us the capacity to explore these avenues of inquiry. My
conclusions in this article are drawn from an exploration of policing in Durban, South
Africa and I close by illustrating the characteristics of permissive space in this context.
That said, I will highlight the potential of this concept to apply to other empirical con-
texts across the globe. My research in Durban took place over 10 months between 2010
and 2013, during which I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a non-
probabilistic, purposely recruited sample of 130 residents across three policing sectors.
To protect the identities of those who wished to remain anonymous, I refer to these police
sectors by the name of the police stations under which they fall: Berea; Chatsworth; and
KwaMashu.
Agamben and everyday policing
Agamben’s work has been hugely influential in recent debates on sovereignty, generat-
ing a great deal of commentary, critique, and empirical work (see De la Durantaye,
2009). His theoretical starting point is the sovereign decision. To explore this ‘decision-
ist’ perspective and its implications, we need to grasp two figures whom Agamben saw
as having structurally similar relations to the law: the sovereign and homo sacer or ‘bare
life’ (Agamben, 1998: 84). Agamben used these figures to challenge Foucault. He argued
that if we understood their relationship to one another, and to the law, we would realize
that ‘bare life’ was the necessary product of the sovereign decision (Agamben, 1998: 6).
For Agamben, this meant that the bio-political had always been bound up in the exercise
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