This article adds to current debates on hybridity by shifting attention from interactions between entities to the enactment of authority. The notion of hybridity has helped move debates on peace and state-building beyond a normative focus on failure and fragility. However, it also remains a contested and evolving concept. This article aims to theorise further the process of hybridisation. By introducing the concept of simultaneity of discourse and practice it explores the process through which seemingly contradictory sources of authority are played out at the same time in order-making to constitute political order. The processes of enactment suggest a model for reading dialogically concepts such as bureaucracy, autochthony, kinship and legislation, exploring how they are co-constituted in spaces of discourse and practice. Inherent to these spaces is a perpetual tension of difference and affinity. It is the dynamism of this tension that defines the hybrid order's quality of simultaneity.

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.

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