Security Dialogue

This article examines how rank-and-file police in contemporary India express work-related grievances regarding official neglect of their well-being, systemic exploitation by government authorities and other elites, and routinized threats of bodily harm and death. It analyzes these experiences as manifestations of a ‘politics of expendability’ through which police, conceived as security laborers, are ironically condemned to exclusion from a morally and materially ‘good life’, and only partially or superficially compensated for the often questionably licit kinds of work demanded of them. Conceiving this politics as both intersecting with and reflective of broader structures of systemic inequality and oppressive violence, I consider recent cases of constables publicly complaining about their working and living conditions through social media, quitting their jobs, and dying by suicide as signs of resignation-cum-protest. In so doing, I demonstrate how the social demands for police work as security labor are co-configured with a devaluation of police life that produces affects of despair and structures of disposability. Rethinking the globalized paradox of police demonization-cum-valorization, this study raises challenging questions about how police in India – as well as in other contexts, and especially in Global South postcolonies – may be conceived as expendable workers. It further considers how, moving forward, we must work to reimagine what policing as institutionalized security labor and police work are – and ought to be.

Securitization theory posits that security threats are socially constructed. Yet, how audiences influence the failure and success of securitization attempts is still not well understood. In this article, I argue that audiences bring their normative perspectives to bear upon the interpretation of securitization attempts. This theoretical addendum, I hold, permits a fuller appreciation of how audiences express their agency when receiving securitization attempts. I examine the Singaporean context, where the discursive backdrop favours the construction of security threats. While the Singaporean government has successfully securitized many issues, Lee Kuan Yew’s attempt to securitize the country’s declining birth rates failed dramatically. This occurred, I contend, as the Singaporean public was deeply offended by the normative premises of Lee’s eugenicist argument, thus refusing to engage with the issue on the government’s terms. These objections were only fuelled by the eugenics programme the government later introduced, ultimately causing the government to discontinue its pronatalist policies and significantly revise its rhetoric. This article develops the understanding of how securitization unfolds by expanding on the conceptualization of audience behaviour. By examining Singapore, which has failed to inspire many analyses of securitization, it also diversifies securitization theory’s empirical reach, highlighting its intelligibility within non-democratic contexts.

How do elite interests intersect with inequality in postcolonial state institutions and shape the consumption and provision of public services such as policing and security? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, this article explores how subordinate officers experience insecurity within postcolonial policing structures owing to class-based hierarchical divisions, and analyses how these conditions shape their experiences, relationships and performances. I argue that structural inequalities within public institutions, influenced by private interests of external actors, compel subordinates to strategically operationalize informality in policework, deploying it in the service of influential actors and institutions. Furthermore, these subordinates rely upon informal networks and practices to appear indispensable and subvert the hierarchy, securing greater personal and professional gains and steering past class-based constraints. This ‘strategic informality’ enables the rank and file to relationally and procedurally navigate otherwise rigid hierarchical institutional structures that suppress them. In exploring how insecurity and inequality, within and beyond policing institutions, in the context of blurred public–private security divides, necessitates reliance upon informality, and what impacts this has, this article makes a critical contribution to scholarship on security provision in postcolonial contexts.