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Policing the Boundary and Bounding the Police: Fictitious Borders and the Making of Gendarmeries in North America
Abstract
This article argues that the mismatch between the legal fictions of the boundaries separating the states of late nineteenth century North America and the reality of local trans-border life helped drive the militarization of borderlands policing. The form this militarization took, in turn, reflected administrative state development; that is, whether they were relatively unitary and centralized, like Canada, or whether they were marked by fragmentation and local autonomy, like Mexico and the US. I use the example of state gendarmeries – mounted, armed policing units combining military and law enforcement functions – to explore this claim.
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The study of borders has undergone a renaissance during the past decade. This is reflected in an impressive list of conferences, workshops and scholarly publications. This renaissance has been partly due to the emergence of a counternarrative to the borderless and deterritorialized world discourse which has accompanied much of globalization theory. The study of borders has moved beyond the limited confines of the political geography discourse, crossing its own disciplinary boundaries, to include sociologists, political scientists, historians, international lawyers and scholars of international relations. But this meeting of disciplines has not yet been successful in creating a common language or glossary of terms which is relevant to all scholars of borders. Central to the contemporary study of borders are notions such as `borders are institutions', the process of `bordering' as a dynamic in its own right, and the border terminologies which focus on the binary distinctions between the `us' and `them', the `included' and the `excluded'. Borders should be studied not only from a top-down perspective, but also from the bottom up, with a focus on the individual border narratives and experiences, reflecting the ways in which borders impact upon the daily life practices of people living in and around the borderland and transboundary transition zones. In positing an agenda for the next generation of border-related research, borders should be seen for their potential to constitute bridges and points of contact, as much as they have traditionally constituted barriers to movement and communication.
The predominant interpretation of nineteenth century Latin America is
to see the failure of constitutional democracy in the region in terms of the
inability of liberal elites to break with an authoritarian past. Against these views,
we argue that the divorce between liberalism and democracy in Latin America
was the unintended outcome of the institutions created by the liberal elite in
response to the problems of territorial fragmentation and factional conflict that
emerged after the fall of the Spanish empire. Using the cases of Argentina and
Mexico, we support this proposition by focusing on the creation of a centralised
form of government and a system of electoral control by the ruling elites as the
main factors that through time prevented the evolution of the liberal regime into
a competitive democracy.
The history of police and policing have been the subject of much interest and research in recent years, but this book provides the first serious academic exploration of the origins and development of the role of soldier-policemen: the gendarmeries of 19th-century Europe. The author presents a detailed account of the French Gendarmeries from the old regime up to the First World War, and looks at the reasons for how and why this model came to be exported across continental Europe in the wake of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. In particular, their role is examined within the differing national contexts of Italy, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire. The gendarmeries, it is argued, played a significant role in establishing the state, particularly in rural areas. As the physical manifestation of the state, gendarmes carried the state's law and a promise of protection, whilst at the same time ensuring in turn that the state received its annual levies of conscripts and taxes. This account fully explores how the organization and style of 19th-century soldier-policing in France developed in such a way that it brought the idea of the state and the state's law to much of 20th-century continental Europe.
This book is about governmental change in America. It examines the reconstruction of institutional power relationships that had to be negotiated among the courts, the parties, the president, the Congress and the states in order to accommodate the expansion of national administrative capacities around the turn of the twentieth century. Stephen Skowronek argues that new institutional forms and procedures do not arise reflexively or automatically in response to environmental demands on government, but must be extorted through political and institutional struggles that are rooted in and mediated by pre-established governing arrangements. As the first full-scale historical treatment of the development of American national administration, this book will provide a useful textbook for public administration courses.
For much of the twentieth century, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials recognized that the US-Mexico border region was different, confronting a set of political, social, and environmental obstacles that prevented them from replicating their achievements on Angel Island and Ellis Island, the most restrictive immigration stations in the nation. In response to these challenges local INS officials resorted to the law, nullifying, modifying, and even inventing immigration laws and policies for the borderlands. The INS on the Line traces the ways in which the INS on the US-Mexico border made and remade the nation’s immigration laws over the course of the twentieth century. While popular and scholarly accounts describe the INS primarily as a law enforcement agency, the author demonstrates that the agency defined itself not only as a law enforcement unit but also as a lawmaking body. Through a nuanced examination of the agency’s legal innovations in the Southwest, the author reveals how local immigration officials constructed a complex approach to border control, an approach that closed the line in the name of nativism and national security; opened it for the benefit of transnational economic and social concerns; and redefined it as a vast legal jurisdiction for the policing of undocumented immigrants. Despite its contingent and local origins, this composite approach to border control continues to inform the daily operations of the nation’s immigration agencies, American immigration law and policy, and our very conceptions of the US-Mexico border today.
Award winning author Gregory S. Kealey's study of Canada's security and intelligence community before the end of World War II depicts a nation caught up in the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and tangled up with the imperial interests of first the United Kingdom and then the United States. Spying on Canadians brings together over twenty five years of research and writing about political policing in Canada. Through itse use of the Dominion Police and later the RCMP, Canada repressed the labour movement and the political left in defense of capital. The collection focuses on three themes; the nineteenth-century roots of political policing in Canada, the development of a national security system in the twentieth-century, and the ongoing challenges associated with research in this area owing to state secrecy and the inadequacies of access to information legislation. This timely collection alerts all Canadians to the need for the vigilant defence of civil liberties and human rights in the face of the ever increasing intrusion of the state into our private lives in the name of countersubversion and counterterrorism.
The coevolution of private detective agencies and municipal police bureaucracies in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago arose from the breakdown of an older system in which the provision of law enforcement was delegated to local communities. The growth of anonymity and the presence of strangers in a city undergoing massive changes in transportation undermined this delegative system and created the perception of new public security threats. These threats were compounded by the mobilization of ethnicity in partisan politics. To address these new concerns, political and e conomic elites did not innovate, but turned to traditional practices like special deputization. The use of deputization allowed some law officers to sell their services as entrepreneurs to private firms, while also paving the way for a new bureaucratic police department. Networks of security providers locked in this transformation and made public and private policing alike a permanent feature of the city's institutional landscape.
iewed from afar, electoral politics in Canada may seem a strange amalgam of predictability and surprise, stability and volatility. At the close of the twentieth century, the party in power is the same one that governed at the beginning of the century and for an inordinate amount of time in between. Yet the contemporary party system seems to bear little relation to that which characterized either turn-of-the-century or mid-century Canadian politics. In fact, several dramatic upheavals have taken place in the relationship between parties and voters. Elections clarify for parties and voters the current character of their relations. Partially obscured, vaguely calibrated, or hidden perils in the voter-party relationship will often rise to the surface during election periods, and the ties that bind diverse communities of voters to particular parties are tested.
Clearly, the relationship between Canadian voters and their political parties has seldom been an easy one, especially at election time. However, to describe it as unstable or volatile would be misleading. There have always been strong currents of continuity and stability in voter-party relations in Canada that are deeply rooted in regional political cultures and party histories, in enduring ties between ethnocultural or linguistic groupings and particualr parties, and in the economic and class cleavages that influence left-right ideological divisions.
Ties That Bind looks at the socio-economic, ethnolinguistic, and demographic factors in party support; the enduring quality of these social bases; the importance of geography in structuring variations in the voter-party relationship; and electoral change as a function of the strategic decisions of the parties and their leaders and the voter response these decisions evoke.
Celebrated accounts of lawless towns that relied on the extra-legal justice of armed citizens and hired gunmen are part of the enduring cultural legacy of the American West. This image of the frontier has been fueled for more than a century by historians-both amateur and academic-and by various popular images. In the twenty-first century, Great Plains communities continue to perpetuate this image with tourist attractions and events that pay homage to their "lawless" past. But these romanticized depictions of the violent frontier do not accurately portray the legal culture of most early Great Plains communities. Law and Order in Buffalo Bill's Country is a case study of law and legal culture in Lincoln County, Nebraska, during the nineteenth century. Mark R. Ellis argues that nascent nineteenth-century Great Plains communities shared an understanding of the law that allowed for the immediate implementation of legal institutions such as courts, jails, and law enforcement. A common legal culture, imported from New England and the Midwest, influenced frontier communities to uphold traditions of law and order even in the "wild and wooly" frontier community of North Platte, Nebraska. This study is one of the first to examine legal institutions on the Great Plains. By setting aside the issue of a violent frontier West and focusing instead on community building and legal institutions, this study presents a very different image of the frontier-era Great Plains.
As historian Miguel Antonio Levario explains in this timely book, current tensions and controversy over immigration and law enforcement issues centered on the US-Mexico border are only the latest evidence of a long-standing atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust plaguing this region. Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy, focusing on El Paso and its environs, examines the history of the relationship among law enforcement, military, civil, and political institutions, and local communities.?In the years between 1895 and 1940, West Texas experienced intense militarization efforts by local, state, and federal authorities responding to both local and international circumstances. El Paso's "Mexicanization" in the early decades of the twentieth century contributed to strong racial tensions between the region's Anglo population and newly arrived Mexicans. Anglos and Mexicans alike turned to violence in order to deal with a racial situation rapidly spinning out of control. ?Highlighting a binational focus that sheds light on other US-Mexico border zones in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Militarizing the Border establishes historical precedent for current border issues such as undocumented immigration, violence, and racial antagonism on both sides of the boundary line. This important evaluation of early US border militarization and its effect on racial and social relations among Anglos, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans will afford scholars, policymakers, and community leaders a better understanding of current policy and its potential failure. Copyright © 2012 by Miguel Antonio Levario Manufactured in the United States of America All rights reserved.
In the tumultuous years following the Civil War, violence and lawlessness plagued the state of Texas, often overwhelming the ability of local law enforcement to maintain order. In response, Reconstruction-era governor Edmund J. Davis created a state-wide police force that could be mobilized whenever and wherever local authorities were unable or unwilling to control lawlessness. During its three years (1870-1873) of existence, however, the Texas State Police was reviled as an arm of the Radical Republican party and widely condemned for being oppressive, arrogant, staffed with criminals and African Americans, and expensive to maintain, as well as for enforcing the new and unpopular laws that protected the rights of freed slaves. Drawing extensively on the wealth of previously untouched records in the Texas State Archives, as well as other contemporary sources, Barry A. Crouch and Donaly E. Brice here offer the first major objective assessment of the Texas State Police and its role in maintaining law and order in Reconstruction Texas. Examining the activities of the force throughout its tenure and across the state, the authors find that the Texas State Police actually did much to solve the problem of violence in a largely lawless state. While acknowledging that much of the criticism the agency received was merited, the authors make a convincing case that the state police performed many of the same duties that the Texas Rangers later assumed and fulfilled the same need for a mobile, statewide law enforcement agency. Copyright
Over the course of the half century from 1865 to 1915, the British and Dutch delineated colonial spheres, in the process creating new frontiers. This book analyzes the development of these frontiers in Insular Southeast Asia as well as the accompanying smuggling activities of the opium traders, currency runners, and human traffickers who pierced such newly drawn borders with growing success. The book presents a history of the evolution of this 3000-km frontier, and then inquires into the smuggling of contraband: who smuggled and why, what routes were favored, and how effectively the British and Dutch were able to enforce their economic, moral, and political will. Examining the history of states and smugglers playing off one another within a hidden but powerful economy of forbidden cargoes, the book also offers new insights into the modern political economies of Southeast Asia.
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy-a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s-its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.
Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. By Robert E. May. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xviii, 426. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $45.00.) Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America is destined to be the standard work on filibustering in nineteenth-century America. Robert E. May, who previously delved into the secret underworld of American expansionism in his prize-winning biography, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (1985), explores nearly every aspect of the private military expeditions that brought notoriety and dreams of empire to generations of adventurers. In this well-written and extensively researched book, he examines the context for filibustering, explores the motivations and logistics behind such schemes, and persuasively argues that the phenomenon was not only linked to the sectional controversy over slavery but also damaged United States' foreign policy and, ironically, limited the nation's territorial expansion. May organizes his study into three parts, with the first three chapters dedicated to providing an overview of filibustering in America. This includes his investigation into the origins of so-called Aaron Burr schemes in the early years of the republic, the growth of such freebooting in the years after the Mexican War, and the place of filibustering in American popular culture. He argues that while other nations also contributed to the nefarious adventures collectively known as filibustering, it was the United States that sent forth the most and best-known expeditions. Though relatively few people actually got involved in such illegal plots (they were in direct violation of the Neutrality Act and other laws), filibustering enjoyed widespread political support and was common enough to be a part of the culture. In the second part of the book, May devotes four chapters to the actual filibustering expeditions. He examines why it was that some Americans decided to join such schemes, how the United States government failed to stop them, the logistics of the expeditions, and what it was actually like to go filibustering. Whether providing support for Narciso Lopez and his attempts to capture Cuba, sending armed parties into Mexico to loot and pillage, or mustering whole armies of mercenaries for the invasion of Central American nations like Nicaragua, a significant number of Americans were caught up in the idea of capturing territory in the name of liberty, although their motivations ranged from sheer love of adventure to ideology to power and greed. The United States government did stop a number of filibusters, although the efforts of authorities often mixed failure with half-hearted attempts to stop expeditions that officers actually hoped would succeed. May concludes that, although some adventures were nipped in the bud by timely intervention, political infighting and popular opinion hampered the government's efforts. Despite popular support, the expeditions were almost always under-funded and poorly organized. …
List of tables and figures Preface Introduction 1. The historical development of the police 2. Arrest trends, 1860-1920 3. Tramps and children: the decline of police welfare 4. A narrowing of function Conclusion Appendixes Notes Index.
This paper critically examines recent historical research which asserts that policing underwent a major transition from a
“class-control” to a “crime-control” model during the late nineteenth century. The authors develop a revised conception of
class control based on an expanded definition of public order offenses to test the alternative thesis that the major shift
in policing primarily involved a change in the form of class control during the Progressive era. Using data on policing and
arrest rates for Toronto from 1859 to 1955, the findings demonstrate that the focus of the police varied across different
types of public order offenses revealing a sustained, but complex, pattern of class control
Christ, I hate to leave Paris for Toronto the city of churches. Ernest Hemingway (circa 1920; cited in Lemon, 1984, p. 323).
This article traces three broad stages in the evolution of two closely-related processes, nineteenth-century Canadian civic government and urban justice. Lower courts, originally administered by Crown-appointed paternalist justices of the peace, were transformed in the era of municipal incorporation into civic courts under mayors and aldermen elected by property holders. Eventually cities adopted permanent government-appointed stipendiary magistrates, ending the tradition of the urban lay magistracy and curtailing the judicial prerogatives of the office of mayor.
Urban justice, the most important mid-nineteenth century municipal service, has been largely neglected by Canadian historians. Future studies will continue to examine the class nature of police and the courts and hopefully also explore the question of relative popularity of the local institutions of justice.
I examine the role of US land policy in strategically controlling and moving populations around the continent with the goal of expanding borders and securing and incorporating new territory on the frontier. The government effectively used land policies and population control to enable an otherwise constrained American state to assert authority over the direction of expansion, to engineer settlement patterns in a manner to secure the territory without a large military, and to maintain an official fidelity to constitutional principles while engineering a dominant racial vision. I examine both the success and failures of these policies over the nineteenth century, with material drawn from government documents and primary sources. I discuss the consequences of this land policy for how we understand the American state in the context of comparative state and racial formation.
Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of `boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.
This paper develops the political economy of the militarization of domestic policing. We analyze the mechanisms through which the “protective state” — where the government utilizes its monopoly on force to protect citizens’ rights — devolves into a “predatory state” which undermines the rights of the populace. We apply our theory to the U.S., where we trace the (failed) historical attempts to establish constraints to separate the military functions and policing functions of government. In doing so we emphasize the role of crises in the form of perpetual wars — the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” — in the accelerated militarization of domestic policing.
The author explores the changing functions of boundaries in territorially and nonterritorially based social organizations. By focusing on the exchanges that boundaries mediate, a fuller account can be given of the systems characteristics in which the units interact than is afforded by traditional systems theory. Two case studies demonstrate that imperial boundaries differ significantly from those in the state system. Boundaries are shown to be the major means for conflict management in the international system. The author also investigates shifts in the location of the boundary, characteristics of balance-of-power systems, and the restriction and expansion of the exchanges that boundaries allow through the bundling or unbundling of territorial rights. Most of the latter devices that gave rise to spheres of influence, buffer states, suzerainties, and so forth have been overtaken by events, but functional regimes and spheres of influence based upon tacit rather than explicit rules remain important.
This paper is a historical survey of the mounted police tradition. The earliest historical references to mounted police can be traced to King Charles’ Articles of War, published in 1629. The British model of mounted policing was introduced to its colonies during the heyday of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. During this era mounted forces were utilized in Africa, the Middle East, India, Canada, and the Pacific colonies, where the tradition flourished until the age of the automobile. In addition to the British model, a ranging tradition of policing developed in Texas with the Texas Rangers. It was most influential on its neighbours in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. An early example of specialized policing, mounted forces have seen a revival in recent years, albeit in an urban setting rather than a colonial or frontier environment.
International Security 28.2 (2003) 78-111
Border control—the effort to restrict territorial access—has long been a core state activity. As territorially demarcated institutions, states have always imposed entry barriers, whether to deter armies, tax trade and protect domestic producers, or keep out perceived "undesirables." All states monopolize the right to determine who and what is granted legitimate territorial access. But there is significant historical variation in border control priorities. Although military defense and economic regulation have traditionally been central border concerns, in many places states are retooling and reconfiguring their border regulatory apparatus to prioritize policing. Thus, rather than simply eroding, as is often assumed, the importance of territoriality is persisting—but with a shift in emphasis. In many cases, more intensive border law enforcement is accompanying the demilitarization and economic liberalization of borders.
The policing objective is to deny territorial access to what I term "clandestine transnational actors" (CTAs), defined as nonstate actors who operate across national borders in violation of state laws and who attempt to evade law enforcement efforts. CTAs are as dramatically varied as their motives. They may be driven by high profits and market demand (e.g., drug traffickers and migrant smugglers), the desire to carry out politically or religiously inspired acts of violence (terrorists), or the search for employment or refuge (the vast majority of unauthorized migrants). They may be highly organized or disorganized and operate regionally or globally. Nevertheless, these otherwise radically different types of CTAs have some core common characteristics: They are the targets of border controls, and their border-crossing strategies are designed to avoid detection and minimize the risk of apprehension. CTAs have existed in one form or another as long as states have imposed border controls. What has changed over time are the organization of CTAs and their methods and speed of cross-border movement; state laws and the form, intensity, and focus of their enforcement; and the level of public anxiety and policy attention.
Although the methods of policing CTAs vary considerably both at and beyond physical borderlines, they can be collectively categorized as "border controls" given that the goal is to selectively deny territorial access. The intensification of border controls in recent years is evident in sharply rising law enforcement budgets; new and more invasive laws; the development of more sophisticated surveillance and information technologies; stricter visa regimes and more technologically advanced and forgery-resistant travel documents; enhanced cooperation with source and transit countries and a greater extension of tracking and control mechanisms beyond the point of entry (i.e., a "thickening" of borders and the creation of buffer zones); and in some places, growing use of military and intelligence hardware, personnel, and expertise for policing tasks. The importance of policing territorial access is also evident in the rising prominence of law enforcement in international diplomacy and in the policy discourse about borders, with many states formally promoting policing from the traditional status of "low politics" to the "high politics" of security. These border changes are most apparent in the advanced industrialized regions of the world, especially the United States and the European Union (EU), and have been substantially reinforced and accelerated by the policy response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Although popularly called a "war," much of the day-to-day activities of counterterrorism resemble crime fighting more than war fighting.
Despite the increasing salience of policing CTAs in world politics, this has not been a central area of study in international relations. Even the expansive literatures on transnational relations and globalization have had little to say about the clandestine side of the transnational world and state efforts to police it. Police matters have typically been bracketed by international relations scholars, left to criminologists and criminal justice specialists who have mostly focused on domestic issues such as local crime control. While the dynamics of border law enforcement and law evasion have been a growing concern of policymakers, international relations debates over borders and territorial controls have tended to concentrate on conventionally defined military and economic issues. On the one hand, many international relations scholars have concluded that the decline of militarized interstate...