Book Review: Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi by Zoha Waseem
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231169312 |
| Author | Amber Lakhani |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
The concluding chapters incisively consider how the issue of informing remains essential
to understanding the dynamics between Sinn Fein, a plethora of dissident groups wedded to
violence, nationalist/republican communities and thestate. Dissidentscharacterize theIRA’s
peace as the ultimate betrayal—by a treacherous leadership—of physical force republican
principles. Ongoing attempts by the security service to recruit informers have been exploited
by dissidents to fortify their self-reinforcing belief that nothing has changed. Appropriating
the discourse of ‘underground penality’allows them to also proclaim the right to punish trai-
tors in their midst as well as criminal elements in nationalist communities. Sinn Fein claims
that dissident groups are a malignant presence,infiltratedandineffectrunbysinisterele-
ments within the British securitate. Appeals by Sinn Fein for nationalist/republican commu-
nities to actively co-operate with the police are, for dissidents, the final turn of the
treacherous screw. These appeals also conflict with anti-informing and anti-police norms
that are being generationally renewed within nationalist/republican communities. The rea-
lignments resultant from the struggle to control the ‘who is a traitor’narrative within
present day Irish republicanism, are for Dudai, the most headspinning aspects of the ‘war
to peace’transitioning process.
Dudai is to be applauded for developing a persuasively structured analytical frame-
work that enables us to understand how the demonization and punishment of informers
has served a variety of shifting functions in the Northern Ireland context. This framework,
which also contributes to the development of a wider understanding of penality, can also
be the basis for researching ‘governing through informers’in other contexts of prolonged
political violence.
Reference
Burns A (2018) Milkman. London: Faber & Faber.
Zoha Waseem, Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial
Karachi, Hurst Publishers: London, 2022; 328 pp. +16 pp. b&w illus: 9781787386884, £40.00
(hbk)
Reviewed by: Amber Lakhani, SOAS, University of London, UK
Insecure Guardians explores policing in the context of colonial continuities and contem-
porary securitization in Karachi. Tracing the colonial legacies of Pakistan’s criminal
justice structures, Waseem examines how the imperatives of regime security and militar-
ized rule have persisted in postcolonial Karachi, and interacted with contemporary socio-
economic and political dynamics to constitute what she describes as the “postcolonial
condition of policing”. The book is grounded in a robust methodology that includes
almost 20 months of fieldwork, some of which was conducted during violent security
operations in the city. Waseem’s pioneering ethnography reveals crucial insights into
the lived realities of everyday police work, as well as the constant physical, economic,
and psychological insecurity inhabited by officers facing unique challenges in policing
a sprawling city of over 20 million people, which continues to struggle with its own pol-
itical and infrastructural challenges.
524 Theoretical Criminology 27(3)
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