Less than two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa is witnessing a range of policy interventions that almost iconoclastically challenge the premises of democratic governance. Police military ranks have been reintroduced and an exemplary postapartheid law governing the use of lethal force has also been amended in favor of police discretion. Simultaneously, however, community policing, a benchmark for democratic policing, is being rolled out on unprecedented scale. This article argues that the seemingly contradictory mobilization of militarized policing and popular civilian institutional forms has a definite logic and captures the postcolonial condition of policing in South Africa: a populist‐oriented ANC administration has allowed practices of popular policing underwritten by a desire for a forceful state to capture the law that had previously restrained this kind of policing. The result is a violent but intimate relationship between police and people, a situation in which the law is estranged from itself and normalized into the informal realm of private policing.

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The counterfeiting of medication is increasingly seen as a major threat to health, especially in the light of both the everyday reliance on and a broadening of world-wide access to pharmaceuticals. Exaggerated or real, this threat has inaugurated, this article argues, a shift from a drug safety regime to a drug security regime that governs the flow of pharmaceuticals and brings together markets, police, and health actors in new ways. This entails a shift from soft disciplinary means aimed at incremental and continued inclusion of defaulters, to one of drastically sovereign measures of exclusion and banishment aimed at fake goods and the people associated with them, in the name of health. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study, this article shows how such new drug security efforts play themselves out especially in (South) Africa, highlighting a modus operandi of spectacular performativity and of working through suspicion and association rather than factuality, producing value less so for those in need of health than for a petty security industry itself.

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The juncture of human rights and policing is a relatively recent field of scholarship. It tends to explain the relationship between policing and human rights as one of exigency and necessity, culminating in the idea of police as human rights defenders. An ethnographically rich scholarship on policing has emerged both as a critical response to these assumptions and out of an awareness of the impossible but nevertheless central role that policing has come to play in a neoliberal age. This critical scholarship takes the juncture of policing and human rights as a historically specific phenomenon and enables us to understand many of its contingencies. It reintegrates the normative presuppositions of human rights policing as societal facts among other societal facts and points to how human rights and policing enable and foreclose new ways of ordering society and bring about particular articulations of biopolitics with assertions of sovereignty.