Abstract
Across the world, people are increasingly asking in whose interest the police operate. In some Anglophone contexts, the notion of policing by consent is being directly challenged. However, for many societies – especially post-colonial societies – the general public has never been under any illusion that the police exist to protect them or uphold a social contract. Zoha Waseem's Insecure Guardians explores and explains that, far from working in the public's interests, British colonisers introduced policing in India as a tool of oppression. Waseem's work contemplates how these violent origins evolved into contemporary dynamics and why this heritage is integral to understanding the post-colonial condition of policing in Pakistan today, focusing on the city of Karachi.
Despite the scale of this task, the clear theoretical framework revolving around the two key facets of ‘militarisation’ and ‘procedural informality’ means that the work remains structured and focused. Waseem sets out her conceptual stall around these two fundamental components in the first chapter and proceeds to elevate the arguments with detailed elaborations on the intricacies of daily policing and the subtleties and informalities that rule them. Over the course of six chapters, Waseem weaves information distilled from more than 200 interviews of serving and retired officers with policy analysis, archival work and case studies to produce a multifaceted investigation. The research is further enriched by remarkable access to police officers’ daily duties around the city. The combination of the above methods alongside this ethnographic observation leads to an absorbing holistic account of the nature of policing in Karachi. A fundamental tenet of Waseem's thesis is that contemporary policing practices are best understood by examining how the demands of the post-colonial Pakistani state interact with a policing institution that remains regime-centric in the mould of the British colonial project.
The introductory chapter and the second chapter, ‘Structures of Suppression’, provide a solid historical foundation for subsequent empirical chapters. Waseem convincingly argues that the introduction and formalisation of policing practices in colonised India specifically protected extractive colonial interests without intending to serve society. The chapters grapple with the notion of the police as an instrument of power. Indeed, Quijano’s (2000) ‘coloniality of power’ is detectible where Waseem explains British dissatisfaction with the dynamics of control when assuming power in 1757 because local systems did not effectively protect trading routes nor uphold the racialised hierarchy according to British hegemony. The sense of state insecurity for those in power is highlighted as a driver for oppressive techniques of policing and is a theme that runs throughout the book. The 1857 revolt, which started with rank-and-file officers, is cited as exemplifying the outcome the Empire wanted to avoid at all costs, which then led to more powerfully repressive tactics. Waseem is clear that while there are sharp colonial continuities with contemporary policing, successive post-independence military and civilian governments have built upon the colonial structures to meet their own political–economic interests. She provides specific pieces of legislation, such as the 1997 Anti-Terrorism Act, to evidence her arguments and demonstrates how lethal violence continues to be given legitimacy in law.
Chapter 3, ‘Of Survival and Subsistence’, is the first of two core ethnographic chapters which contain some beautifully textured analysis drawing on local conceptualisations and interpretations of culture and dynamics. While Waseem identifies the police as a political institution, her analysis is far more nuanced than to suggest that it means that officers are simply aligned with the state. Waseem notes that, in the daily operationalisation of their work, the police are, in effect, ‘violence workers’; however, they are also victims of the structured violence which results from the continuity in colonial power asymmetries. Many of the public-facing police in Pakistan are also impoverished and come from the same neighbourhood as those they are tasked to control and, therefore, occupy a dual position as both oppressor and oppressed. In exploring these points, Waseem exposes the disingenuousness of normative rhetoric which not only claims that the police work in the public's interest but also reveals the quandary many police officers face in choosing between starvation and predation. In this way, Waseem presents what could be described as a form of professional conviviality, whereby officers must learn the art of living with the demands of elites and the public, negotiating their role within and beyond the bounds of the law.
Where Chapter 3 highlights the precarity that many street-level police officers face, Chapter 4, ‘Beyond the Grey Lines’, focuses on various political patrons situated above them in the vertically organised systems. The chapter reveals that despite the official separation of these actors from the police, everyday policing activities remain driven by their interests. A full appreciation of policing can, therefore, only be realised with the examination of this vital interaction between officers and these centres of power. This fourth chapter provides numerous examples of how police officers are expected to find a way to fulfil their superiors’ commands, yet are only able to do so by engaging in corruption and likely extrajudicial violence. Officers must follow written and unwritten rules meaning that the operationalisation of policing is only realised via procedural informality. Waseem notes that while many officers are under considerable pressure to operate outside the law, other officers benefit from the patronage and appreciate it as a possible route to social mobility. Without pointing to it directly, Waseem discusses the institutional understanding of justice at an ontological level. The embeddedness of ‘VIP culture’ speaks to hierarchical citizenship that has become naturalised to the point that it is automatic practice for public resources to be rerouted to protect the most privileged. Here, we see evidence of the coloniality of being.
Chapter 5, ‘The Other Brother’, imagines the military as the sibling institution to the police. The chapter revolves around three case studies to illustrate that state fragility has led to an overt concentration on securitisation and competition between policing entities and paramilitary organisations such as the Sindh Rangers. The chapter emphasises many blurred lines between the institutions and demonstrates how classical conceptual dualisms, such as the division between internal and external security or civil and military operations, do not hold. Policing operations and paramilitary organisations have political origins and continue to be used as a mechanism for competing partisan projects. At the base, both justify their positions through intimations of national security maintenance whilst acting per the agendas of their patrons.
Whilst the concluding chapter makes a compelling case for the theoretical framework to be considered in future comparative work, especially with post-colonial contexts such as India and Nigeria, the undeniable strength of the study is in its interpretivist analysis, drilling down into the Karachi context on its own terms. It did not escape my notice that I was reading a Pakistani scholar on Pakistani context about the tangible legacies of British colonialism in English. The geopolitics of knowledge has created a landscape in which it has been dictated that we should consider other contexts in relation to traditional centres of power. This research contends with the Pakistani context without deference or comparison to the North or West. The work will resonate theoretically and methodologically with scholars adopting post-colonial, Southernising or decolonial lenses. It should also make its way to the desks of all those interested in the intentions, complexities and contradictions contained within contemporary policing – not to assert universal application – but rather as an example of a contextually and culturally specific investigation. Waseem paints a persuasive picture of the post-colonial condition of policing in Pakistan by coaxing out the colonial continuities and the post-independence evolution of these dynamics. In this sense, the monograph can be understood as a convincing, thought-provoking and insightful illustration of the coloniality of policing in Pakistan.
