‘My Kids Won’t Grow up Here’: Policing, Bordering and Belonging
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619843296 |
| Author | Leanne Weber |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619843296
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(1) 71 –89
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619843296
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‘My Kids Won’t Grow up
Here’: Policing, Bordering and
Belonging
Leanne Weber
Monash University, Australia
Abstract
Police researchers have long posited a connection between policing and belonging,
or between policing and related concepts such as citizenship. However, much of this
literature does not include empirical data demonstrating the actual impact of policing
experiences on individuals and communities. Where it does, belonging is rarely located
at the centre of analysis. In this article, I explore the role of policing in generating
experiences and perceptions of belonging. I connect the theoretical literature on
policing, borders and belonging by conceiving of everyday policing as a racialized
process of social bordering, and present evidence from a qualitative study with migrant
communities in southern-eastern Melbourne, Australia. I conclude that discriminatory
policing reinforces social boundaries that are relevant to both ‘belonging’ and the
‘politics of belonging’, and identify police, in conjunction with other social actors and
institutions, as potentially powerful agents of ‘governmental belonging’.
Keywords
Belonging, borders, boundaries, governmental belonging, policing, politics of belonging,
racialization
Introduction
Police researchers have long posited a connection between policing and belonging. Police
have been described by Loader (2006) as mediators of belonging and by Waddington
(1999) as arbiters of citizenship, while Tyler (1997) notes that police communicate during
Corresponding author:
Leanne Weber, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Melbourne, Victoria 3800, Australia.
Email: leanne.weber@monash.edu
843296TCR0010.1177/1362480619843296Theoretical CriminologyWeber
research-article2019
Article
72 Theoretical Criminology 24(1)
encounters with members of the public whether or not individuals are respected members
of groups. Qualitative work in the stop and search genre has reported experiences of shame,
anger and discrimination associated with unwanted street stops (e.g. Brunson and Miller,
2006; Parmar, 2011). Belonging, and related concepts, have also been invoked in the con-
text of border criminology, where internal bordering practices (whether performed by
police or others) are said to delineate boundaries of belonging, entitlement and citizenship
(Bosworth et al., 2017; Brouwer et al., 2018; Weber and Bowling, 2008). However, in this
body of research the possibility that police encounters can affect belonging has not usually
been the explicit focus of empirical inquiry.
In this article, I connect the theoretical literatures on policing, borders and belonging
by conceiving of everyday policing as an ‘internal bordering practice’ that reinforces
social boundaries in ways that influence belonging and experiences of belonging at a
number of levels. I engage with some prominent theories of belonging and contribute
empirically to the policing literature by presenting evidence from a qualitative study on
the reported impact of encounters between police and young people from migrant and
refugee backgrounds on their perceptions of belonging. The article begins by compar-
ing the concepts of borders and boundaries to establish how it can be that everyday
policing—as opposed to ‘migration policing’ that is directed explicitly towards the
enforcement of immigration law (Aliverti, 2015; Weber, 2013)—might operate as a
form of bordering. I then explore the idea of belonging, noting distinctions made by key
theorists between belonging and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2010) and
between passive and governmental belonging (Hage, 2000), in order to give substance
to the idea of ‘borders of belonging’.
Finally, I present material from a qualitative study conducted in the south-eastern
suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. That study involved informal discussions with youth
workers over a two-year period from mid-2016 to mid-2018, plus recorded interviews
and focus groups with young people aged 16 years and over from migrant and refugee
backgrounds and older members of their communities. The study is ‘exploratory’ and
was part of a larger, still ongoing, research programme aimed at producing new theory
about internal bordering practices. Rather than testing existing theories, the approach
was inductive and open ended (see Weber, 2018)—allowing research participants to
define their own conception of belonging, and remaining open also to the inclusion of
whatever groups of young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds were impacted
by the boundary-reinforcing effects of everyday policing. More details about the meth-
odology are included in the empirical sections of the article. The limitations of this
exploratory design, and ideas for future research are canvassed in the conclusion.
Policing, boundaries and belonging
Borders, boundaries and citizenship
It is now commonplace to conceive of borders as non-geographic, relational and per-
formative. For example, Geddes (2008) distinguishes territorial borders from what he
calls organizational and conceptual borders. Territorial borders are the familiar geo-
graphically defined borders policed by customs and immigration authorities that are the
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