Many studies have emphasized the pluralization of policing and the interactions between security providers. However, such studies generally employ a top-down and structural approach, emphasizing the organizational ties between policing bodies. This article employs an ethnographic approach to security and focuses on localized policing performances that materialize from the interactions between security providers. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Durban, South Africa, this article introduces the concept of twilight policing, which refers to punitive, disciplinary and exclusionary policing practices that simultaneously undermine and support the state, resulting in actions that are neither public nor private, but 'twilight'. This article calls for a shift from a plural and organizational approach to policing towards a 'twilight' and performative one.

In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘securitizing capital’ as a new analytical tool to understand the pluralized landscape of security. We define securitizing capital as a process whereby different forms of capital are, consciously and unconsciously, used to acquire legitimacy and power. While other approaches have been developed to understand pluralized security, such as security networks, nodal frameworks and assemblages, we argue that, useful as they are, they tend to overlook issues of agency, how relationships are established and negotiated and the subjective experiences of security. In contrast, we introduce a processual-relational approach that is based on the translation and conversion of other types of capital, such as economic and social, to acquire a position of power within a specific (security) ‘field’. In order to elaborate on our approach and its relevance, we draw on fieldwork conducted in Kenya, Jamaica and Israel.

This article analyses how issues of race influence the occupational culture of the armed response sector, a particular part of the private security industry, in Durban, South Africa. In addition to analysing the racial hierarchy of the industry, this article examines the 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' -Bravo Mike meaning black male in NATO phonetic alphabet code. The 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' refers to the racialised imaginaries of criminals and the subsequent policing practices performed by armed response officers to protect clients from this racially constructed dangerous 'Other'. However, as the majority of armed response officers are 'Bravo Mikes' themselves, there is a constant element of friction in their performances. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article thus analyses how racialised understandings of crime influence, and are reproduced by, private policing practices, thereby contributing to studies on private security occupational cultures and racial profiling.

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