Book review: Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois and Nils Zurawski (eds), The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-Terrorism and Border Control
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| Author | Paul Mutsaers |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616659817 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 523
Beatrice Jauregui (pp. 125–153) tackles the question of the ethical stance of participant
observers working with violent police. Jauregui’s discussion moves beyond simple
ideas such as ‘ethnographic seduction’ or ‘complicity’ where the researcher is drawn
across a moral boundary by the police with whom they work. In place of these, she sug-
gests ‘strategic complicity’, drawing on the postcolonial work of Spivak (1988), whose
concern—with an ironic twist—was with how the powerful researcher can engage sub-
alterns. For Jauregui working with police, strategic complicity involves ‘continually
striving to engage critically with the Other, while allowing said Other to exist and con-
tribute to the building of knowledge with its own voice’ (pp. 147–148, emphasis added).
The other essays in this text follow a similar project. For example, Jeffrey Martin’s
analysis of police culture in contemporary Taiwan (pp. 157–179) addresses what would be
regarded by criminology as the suborning of police by corrupt local businessmen. However,
Martin examines how police practice starts from quite different assumptions to those taken
for granted in most criminological theory. The category of ‘crime’ itself is problematized
because the distinction between illegality and neighbourhood politics is ‘weak’, while
‘neighbourhood patrol men are supposed to be woven into the fabric of neighbourhood
affairs’ (p. 161). Thus within the cultural and political milieu of policing modern Taiwan,
patronage by local community leaders appears not as corrupt but as ‘righteous’. Police in
Taiwan cannot be comprehended through taken-for-granted expectations derived from
studies of northern police. They do not enforce abstract laws, they do not ‘fight crime’
(even facilitating illegalities); rather ‘they are there to hold things together, to manage the
way trouble ramifies through the received political economy’ (p. 176).
One result, Martin argues, is that trying to approach policing with the assumptions
about police that inform Foucault (and by implication other ‘northern’ theorists) ‘com-
plicates the project of studying it anthropologically’ (p. 163). Put less diplomatically,
transporting theoretical understandings of police into exotic settings reveals not the
‘peculiarities’ of the setting, but the substantial limitations of the theories—limitations
invisible to those who remain focused on policing of the ‘core’. Theorizing police and
policing in terms and frameworks provided by the ‘greats’ of European sociology and
criminology, is no longer (never was) sustainable as a practice whose theoretical
embrace conveniently ignores most policing in the world.
References
Connell R (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science.
London: Routledge.
Porter A (2014) Decolonising juvenile justice: Aboriginal patrols, safety and the policing of indig-
enous communities. Doctoral Thesis, Faculty of Law, The University of Sydney.
Spivak G (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In: Nelson C and Grossberg L (eds) Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois and Nils Zurawski (eds), The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives
from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-Terrorism and Border Control, Pluto Press: London, 2014;
209 + ix pp.: 9780745334578£22,49
Reviewed by: Paul Mutsaers, Tilburg University, the Netherlands
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