Thai Police in Refractive Cultural Practice

Haanstad, Eric

doi:10.1057/9781137309679_8

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Perception is conditioned by historical memory, ensuring that all policing systems are at least partially indigenized (Haanstad 2013, Kwon 2014. But the driving force of history often comes from outside, sometimes in the form of interventions designed explicitly to "establish the conditions for policing" (Feldman 2015, p. 27).…”

Section: Pluralism and Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

Police and Policing

Martin

2018

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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The anthropology of policing draws from a range of intellectual traditions to generate new understandings of the police as an institution and policing as a social practice. This article reviews recent anthropological work on police, situating it in longer-term disciplinary concerns. I begin with the connection between policing and personhood, exploring how the subject–object dynamics of police domination are related to anthropological conceptions of kinship, law, and social control. I then turn to the contribution that anthropological ethnography makes to a critical theory of the relationship between sovereignty, violence, and police power. I conclude by reflecting on the situation of scholarship in our current political environment, suggesting that the anthropological turn to policing is animated, in part, by hope for a better understanding of the nature of moral agency under difficult conditions.

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Section: Pluralism and Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

Police and Policing

Martin

2018

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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“…As I show, what is produced, however, is something better described as “refraction”: democratic practices, principals, concepts, and toolkits veer off the course imagined by donor agencies when they pass through democracy‐promotion intermediaries, or replicators. Anthropologists have used the metaphor of refraction to understand a variety of phenomena, including Nuer cosmology (Evans‐Pritchard ), Greek iconography and local allegiances (Herzfeld ), Thai policing (Haanstad ), imperial genealogies (Stoler and Bond ), and the relational shaping of moral subjects (Han ). In many of these works, the metaphor of refraction speaks to a prism‐like effect of making visible sociopolitical processes, or captures a kind of splitting or segmentation.…”

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confidence: 99%

Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia

Ellison

2015

PoLAR

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Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia In the wake of a massive 2003 uprising in El Alto, Bolivia, U.S. democracy assistance programs targeted the city, promising to address Alteños' frustration with democratic institutions and to teach deliberative democratic skills. In this article I examine the position of civic education "replicators." I use this term to describe people from the city of El Alto-many of them young adults-who were trained by U.S. democracy assistance programs to promote renewed and rehabilitated democratic practices among Alteños. I consider what the position of replicators reveals about the governance technologies, aid ideologies, and objectives of U.S. democracypromotion programs. I argue that despite these programs' emphasis on producing subjects who are "governable," replicators are engaged in complex negotiations regarding the form and content of democracy assistance programs, and many continue to enact political practices that donor representatives frequently characterize as outmoded, illiberal, and antidemocratic. Through the experiences of replicators, we learn that liberal democratic concepts, practices, and subjectivities are already mediated and refracted through lived histories and sociopolitical affiliations of the very people tasked with their duplication and spread. Attending to the microdynamics of replication exposes how that repetition itself helps create the conditions under which replicators come to question their endeavors and to articulate understandings of democracy that incorporate practices donors would likely reject. [democracy, foreign aid, political subjectivity, NGOs, Bolivia]In October 2003, thousands of residents of the city of El Alto laid siege to Bolivia's adjacent seat of government, La Paz. Although the flashpoint of the uprising was the export of Bolivia's natural gas supplies, the popular protests expressed a deeper dissatisfaction with neoliberal economic development policies and the state of democratic institutions in the country (Arbona and Kohl 2004;Kohl and Farthing 2006;Lazar 2008). Within days, La Paz was effectively cut off from the rest of the country. 1 Airlines stopped running. Food shortages stripped the markets bare. The conjoined cities ran out of cooking gas and gasoline, and even the wounded and dead had to be wheel-barrowed to makeshift hospitals or morgues. Alteños did not lift the siege until Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled the country for Miami, Florida, and his vice president, Carlos Mesa, assumed power.

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“…Martin (2018) advocates for a theoretical reengagement with the notion of "police culture," which was influential in criminological literature on police in the 1960s and 1970s. Martin (2018) suggests that we understand the position of police officers as one of translating structural violence into "overt, tangible form" (p. 35; for a similar argument see Haanstad 2013). Although the discussions are still ongoing, it seems that efforts to engage with the experiences of police officers in general locate the drive for violence beyond the officers themselves.…”

Section: Experiences Of Police Officersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intimacies of policing: Violent relationships among hawkers and Inspectorate officers in central Nairobi

Dragsted

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General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal -the text, I want to express my gratitude towards them. Among the hawkers, I am especially grateful to Wangari, Njeri, Wachira and Samuel for welcoming me into spaces where I produced awkwardness, and for mitigating this awkwardness with incredible forthcomingness and a lot of jokes. Later on, Wangari, Njeri, Wachira and Samuel also performed invaluable work as research assistants. Among the Inspectorate officers, I am especially grateful to Kuria, Ndevu and Richard for trusting me with their personal histories and opinions in a context of general suspicion towards outsiders. I benefitted greatly from the research assistance of Ruth Mwikali Jonathan, who collaborated with me on an extensive interview study. I gained many insights from our joint work and conversations. Gregory Mwaniki and Trevas Matathia helped with archival sources, and Paul Munyao assisted with his cartographic skills. In Nairobi, I was privileged to have the most wonderful home away from home with Mutheu, Malli and Robert. I am grateful to so many people for friendship, for company and for all those stories and pieces of advice that give depth and complexity to a place where one is a newcomer, as I was to Nairobi. Although I cannot mention everyone, I want to thank Julius Mwaniki, General, Purity, Karimi, Kimani, Catrine Christiansen, Peter Kiama and everyone in the PhD seminars and reading group meetings at the British Institute in Eastern Africa.I am grateful to my supervisor, Steffen Jensen, for supporting me throughout the entire research process, for always being approachable and generous with his time and for facilitating my process with the kind of insightful, encouraging and pragmatic critique that helped me move along at every stage. I am grateful to my co-supervisor, Anja Kublitz, for supporting the writing of this dissertation with analytical playfulness and editorial sharpness, and for generally showing me both intellectual and personal generosity. At Aalborg University, I was affiliated with the master's study program and research group Global Refugee Studies. Many wonderful colleagues made this affiliation enjoyable. In particular, I want to thank Sif Lehman, Mads Emil Kjaersgaard and Michael Ulfstjerne for stimulating conversations and good company, and Michael for reading and commenting on several pieces of writing over the years.

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Thai Police in Refractive Cultural Practice

Cited by 15 publications

References 18 publications

Police and Policing

Police and Policing

Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia

Intimacies of policing: Violent relationships among hawkers and Inspectorate officers in central Nairobi

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