Abstract
Zoha Waseem's Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi is a compelling addition to sociological and criminological scholarship on police and policing. I also imagine this book to be of significant interest to urban studies scholars, given its examination of messy intersections between police work, urbanisation, and urban governance. Insecure Guardians is a well-detailed ethnography of the complex dynamics that shape law enforcement in Karachi, Pakistan. Situated in an otherwise understudied postcolonial context within policing studies, the book stands out as a critical scrutiny of policing institutions, practices, and cultures in postcolonial contexts. It outlines how political turmoil, ethnic diversity, and pervasive insecurity shape contemporary policing practices in the Pakistani megacity, remaining mindful of the police institutions colonial past. In discussing complex challenges such as underfunding of the institution, its politicisation, and the public's lack of trust in it, the book demonstrates how the postcolonial condition continues to structure and shape the relationship between the police, state, and society in present-day Karachi. The findings are rich and presented in vivid detail. They are based on prolonged ethnographic engagement with Sindh police, through participant observations and qualitative interviews with a wide range of law enforcement officers, state representatives, political workers, lawyers, journalists, and members of the public. The author's positionality as a Karachiite and a member of the ‘police family’ is of crucial significance. It provides a unique insider perspective on the subject matter through exceptional access to a range of officials. It not only allows insight to inner workings and reception to candid opinions, but also gives room to a critical empathy that helps situate the workings of policing institutions within the context of everyday personal and professional challenges of doing police work in a complex environment.
The core arguments of Insecure Guardians are first that the colonial foundations of Sindh police have continuities in present-day institutional relationships between the police, the state, and society. Second, that social and political inequalities within the institution, and between the police and other law enforcement agencies shape both police practices, but also procedures. And finally, the police is both an extension of a society that survives through navigating uncertainty through informality and mobilisation of patronage networks. At the same time, it is also an institution that legitimates its actions through an environment of uncertainty and a product of patronage. These arguments are explained in detail through the different chapters of the books. The introduction sets the context for explaining the militarised police as an institution that is heavily politicised. Police officers are introduced as brutal ‘violence workers’ who frequently operate through procedural exceptions to respond to demands made by insecure political elites within a competitive political environment. As guardians of this insecure regime, we learn that police officers grapple with their own insecurities. The institution is subservient in hierarchy within the larger array of state/bureaucratic institutions and operates with little legitimacy. As a result, officials from across the ranks must invent ways to maintain the institutions’ political relevance and to survive the consequences of the political orders that it must follow. The problem, however, is circular.
The second chapter presents a systematic overview of the postcolonial policing culture of Sindh police. We learn that police excesses and extrajudicial actions were legitimised by successive democratic and military regimes in newly independent Pakistan. In trying to establish control over the rapidly expanding industrial and port city and ‘unruly’ migrant labour, governments applied the ‘doctrine of necessity’ to maintain law and order. On one hand, the police were tasked with brutally suppressing political riots and ethnic conflicts in the violent city, and on the other hand, the police systematically participated in protection rackets to both survive and maintain some level of control over proliferating criminal groups. Here, we learn how despite their known malpractices, the political situation of the city resulted in reforms that enabled an unpreceded militarisation of police forces and an expansion of police powers. Counterterrorism practices and extrajudicial killings bled into routine police work, putting police officers in a peculiar position of extreme power as well as vulnerability to violent reprisals form targeted ethno-political parties and criminal gangs.
The remaining chapters develop this paradoxical relationship between security and insecurity within the institution and police work. Detailed descriptions of police work and references to events and processes are provided to develop and explain the framework of ‘procedural informality’. This framework refers to a variety of informal procedures, practices, and behaviours by officers in routine police work. We learn that at times, procedural informality allows for a workaround in an institutional environment that is frustrating for the task of effectively policing crime and conflict. It allows the police to circumvent overly rigorous processes and unjust judicial and legal systems. Such an informality works to improve police legitimacy by appeasing a public demanding a crushing response to urban insecurity. It also works as a quick fix to counter deeper institutional challenges that would require political consensus, meaningful funding, and time to meaningful resolve. Resources that the institutional and public are chronically short of.
At other times, we learn that procedural informality responds to demands placed on the police by institutional and bureaucratic elites. In a hangover from colonial times, the police are expected to perform ‘dirty work’ on behalf of the political elite, while those who order the tasks deny giving the orders. Insecure Guardians sheds light on how judicial oversight coupled with rigid hierarchies within the police institution operate to facilitate ‘dirty work’. It is inevitably carried out by ambitious rank and file officers – who hail from socio-economically marginal backgrounds – to ‘get the job done’. The present structure of the police force echoes colonial pasts, where senior-most positions are held by elite or middle-class gazetted officers, while the rank-and-file foot soldiers have little hope to exponentially advance in their careers unless they perform such exceptional favours. In carrying out ‘off the book’ actions, rank and file officers may lose their jobs, or even risk their lives. But they also stand to gain career mobility and social security through out-of-turn promotions in a structurally unequal institution. Such actions and related promotions do, however, impact police morale within the broader institution. This acknowledgment of the complexity of informality in relation to social class is an incredibly valuable contribution to the scholarship on policing.
The title Insecure Guardians is a clever play of words on the situation that the Sindh Police finds itself in. The unequal status of officers within the police force, the politicisation of the institution, its blatant prioritisation of urban elites over service to the broader public, and the realities of operating with dwindling operational resources push the police towards routine corruption and procedural practices that substantially erode public trust. At the same time, the police operate in an environment of institutional competition. Paramilitary forces (Sindh Rangers) patronised by the state military are periodically put into action in Karachi to partake in heavily militarised operations against militant-political groups or criminal gangs. Sindh Rangers have a superior reputation amongst the public for being effective in violently eliminating sources of insecurity and enabling prolonged peace in the city. Often operating as a parallel police force that maintains authority over the Sindh police, the Rangers’ popularity in Karachi works to threaten the Sindh Police. In return, Sindh Police turns to performative action to re-establish legitimacy, accountability, and trust. Militarised practices, vigilante justice, appointments, transfers, and institutional shakeups are enacted as performative strategies that aim to win the public's favour.
Overall, Insecure Guardians presents a nuanced analysis of police operations and the complexities of policing in postcolonial Karachi. It is packed with minute details of events and processes and is laden with rich description and discussion. While this is mostly enjoyable, the amount of detail can be unwieldy, and a bit challenging to digest for those unfamiliar with politics in Karachi/Pakistan. The conclusion presents a succinct summary of the core arguments, followed by examples of how ‘procedural informality’ is evident in other postcolonial contexts. I find this arrangement limiting to the ambition of the thesis. There is potential for widening the analysis by discussing ‘procedural informality’ to consider broader parallels beyond the postcolonial. For example, I am intrigued to know how procedural informality relates to police discretion, moral ambiguities, plausible deniability, or strategic uncertainty. While the book clearly establishes the significance of the concept of procedural informality for postcolonial contexts, I also believe that it holds relevance for scholarship on policing and governing insecurity beyond the ‘postcolonial’, where authoritarian policing and routine aberrations are increasingly coming into light. Having said this, Insecure Guardians is an important book, and one that deserves sustained academic engagement.
