The Policing of Flows: Challenging Contemporary Criminology
Abstract
Rectifying the fact that little criminological attention has been paid to the notion that the security of flows increasingly embodies concerns at the heart of contemporary policing practices, this book makes a significant contribution to knowledge about the policing and security governance of flows.
The book focuses on how the growing centrality of flows affects both contemporary 'risks' and the policing organisations in charge of managing them. The contributors analyse flows such as event security; border controls and migration; the movement of animal parts; security-related intelligence; and organisational flows. The emerging criminology of these, as well as flows of money, information and numerous commodities, from pharmaceuticals to minerals or malicious software, is leading to critical advances in the understanding of the changing harm landscapes and the practices that have developed to manage them.
Taken as a whole, the book opens up the conversation, and encourages the invention of new conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools to help criminology tackle and better understand the mobile world in which we live. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Crime.
... Our analysis contributes to the discussion of what factors explain the emergence of polycentric governance at the city-scale, illustrating how actors' social obligations-their "duty of care"-incentivized the mobilization of polycentric institutional and infrastructural arrangements in the governance of water security. The case illustrates both the potential, but also the limitations of shifts towards greater polycentricity in the context of critical resource provisioning, as the actors grappled with maintaining multiple "flows" (Amicelle et al., 2019) in context of acute disturbance. These flows encompassed the interdependent material flow of water through the physical infrastructure of the city, but also, critically, the feedback of accountability and legitimacy entailed in providing water service to each actors' constituents, relations of trust between private and public actors, and the financial flows that uphold the viability of public and private organizations. ...
The threat of service failures because of climate shocks can provoke a re‐negotiation of roles and responsibilities among private and public actors, and a shift towards more polycentric arrangements. This research builds on frameworks for documenting the emergence and evolution of polycentric governance arrangements through an analysis of the enrollment of private corporate actors in water provisioning services in response to the “Day Zero” 2017–2018 drought in Cape Town, South Africa. Through an analysis of interview data, we document the motivations of the corporate and municipal actors to coordinate their efforts to address acute water shortages through a novel governance venue and mechanism: Water Service Intermediaries. We document their experience with collaboration in the governance arrangements that evolved. The case illustrates both the potential, but also the limitations of shifts toward polycentricity in the context of critical resource provisioning. Our actor‐centric approach documents the transaction and material costs associated with new regulatory burdens as the actors negotiated their respective responsibilities and roles. Actors face coordination challenges associated with their dependence on shared physical infrastructure, tensions associated with duties of care towards specific constituencies, and the friction entailed in reconciling their new nodal responsibilities and core missions. While the experiment in this form of polycentric water provisioning was curtailed at the end of the drought, the evidence of feedback and learning among private and public actors indicates a shift in mindsets concerning joint responsibilities for urban resilience, and the potential for future collaboration in polycentric governance around novel issues.
... Nevertheless, there is limited understanding of which actors, and what combination of informal and formal institutions, shape the infrastructural arrangements that enable flows of critical goods and services 12 . Nor do we have an adequate understanding of how responses to disturbances enable, and constrain, novel and innovative shifts in governance arrangements 17 . ...
The structure and functioning of formal and informal governance arrangements and associated infrastructure prior to major environmental disturbance play a central role in how cities experience and respond to such events. This paper considers how city managers, businesses, and residents responded to two disturbances experienced in the City of Cape Town—a drought-induced water crisis and a pandemic crisis (COVID-19) that followed a year later—and the consequences of these actions for infrastructural assets and governance innovations. Our analysis suggests that efforts aimed at transformative change in these provisioning systems require attention to the existing and potential roles and responsibilities of private and public sector actors, as well as the associated distribution of risks and rewards. Furthermore, polycentric and decentralized governance arrangements, which are often thought to be most flexible in the face of shocks, are not always feasible or desirable to actors with a stake in resource governance.
Algorithms, biometrics and body scanners, computers and databases, infrastructures of various kinds, ranging from what is commonly referred to as ‘hi-tech’ to ‘low-tech’ items such as walls or paper files, have garnered increased attention in critical approaches to (in)security. This article introduces a special issue whose contributions aim to further these approaches by questioning the role and political effects of security devices. It proposes an analytics of devices to examine the configuration and reconfiguration of security practices by attending to the equipment or instrumentation that make these practices possible and temporally stabilize them. The aim here is not to advance devices as a new unit of analysis, but to open new forays in ongoing debates about security politics and practices, by asking different research questions and developing new research angles. We start by outlining what is at stake when thinking of and analysing security practices through devices, or shifting from the language of technology and ‘technologies of security’ to security devices. The remainder of the article then specifies how an analytics of devices involves a more varied vocabulary of performativity, on the one hand, and agency, on the other.
This essay adopts a sociological approach to security. It develops an international political sociology of security practices, subsuming elements from constructivist approaches to security, such as the Aberystwyth, Copenhagen, and Paris approaches (Wæver 2004; c.a.s.e. collective 2006; Bigo 2008). Following the path of a collective intellectual, discussing in an interdisciplinary way security, liberty, migration, and development, this essay has been written by a collective group of five authors. This collective is part of a larger collective group, called the c.a.s.e. collective, which has already published a long manifesto providing a critique of traditional approaches to security, exclusively grounded in international relations and political science. We will not repeat here the different arguments against the Realist, Liberal, and English Schools of security studies as we prefer to build a new space for thought and discussion which takes what practices of security are and what they do seriously
We begin this paper by reviewing some recent transformations in governance. We then propose three new concepts that we believe assist us in coming to terms with these transformations and the political statuses that have emerged as part of them. These concepts are ‘nodal governance’, ‘denizens’, and ‘communal space’. Following this we will explore the normative implications of nodal governance as it has taken shape to date, with an emphasis on the ‘governance disparity’ that is paralleling the ‘wealth disparity’ across the globe. In response to this disparity, we will end with an outline of a normative vision and practical programme aimed at deepening democracy in poor areas of South Africa, Argentina, and elsewhere. We will argue that the main virtue of nodal governance, namely, the emphasis on local capacity and knowledge can be retrieved, reaffirmed, and reinstitutionalized in ways that enhance the self-direction of poor communities while strengthening their ‘collective capital’.
Scholars have noted that we are increasingly being governed in the name of security, in literature that usually treats security as an entity in need of a theory. This article begins by noting that ‘security’ does not need theories, but rather questions that can generate concrete analyses. Three sets of questions are elaborated here. The first concerns the logics of security projects. The second set raises questions of scale and jurisdiction. Finally, governance projects are distinguished by the techniques used. This set of questions about security—which, this article argues, always need to be posed in relation to specific security projects—is a theoretically significant revision of the governmentality literature’s distinction between rationalities and technologies of governance.
This paper contests traditional analyses of high policing, suggesting that it needs to be decoupled (in theoretical terms)
from its umbilical linkage to public actors and the preservation and augmentation of state authority. Arguing that conventional
conceptualizations of high policing fail to acknowledge the role of private actors, we adopt the term ‘private high policing’
to more accurately reflect the complexity of this paradigm. In particular, we note a long legacy of protecting dominant interests
within corporate power structures, as well as increased involvement in outsourced security services for Western states. This
has reached its zenith in the recent conflict/reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Eschewing conventional notions of the ‘proxy’
debate, we propose a more complex relationship of obfuscation whereby both public and private high policing actors cross-permeate
and coalesce in the pursuit of symbiotic state and corporate objectives.
This article is a contribution to the theorization of global maritime circulation as a key category of a global biopolitics of security. It seeks to advance knowledge on the ways in which liberal life is promoted and protected by exacerbating global circulation. It focuses on the security effects of a complex maritime insurance apparatus driven by global insurance in which the Joint War Committee of the Lloyd’s Market Association and the International Underwriting Association plays a pivotal role. Through the analysis of the inclusion of the Strait of Malacca in the Lloyd’ War List in 2006 under the argument of heightened piracy, it is argued that global maritime insurance performs a special security role, that of stewardship, in securing the circulation of the high seas.
Money laundering is a very modern crime created by the late twentieth-century state to enlist the financial sector in its search of the proceeds of crime and prevention of career criminality, particularly transnational crime. This article presents examples that illustrate the variety of methods available and kind of persons involved, along with some classifications. It discusses the relationship of money laundering to corruption control and analyzes the effects of anti-money laundering controls. It provides a brief assessment of the consequences of the control system. A broad and intrusive set of controls has been erected to prevent money laundering. The system generates substantial crime or corruption control benefits which must be high on the agenda of the relevant policy-making community.
Targeted financial sanctions regimes and regulations on ‘dirty money’ put banks on the front line in securing financial circulation. This is the context in which banking actors face the challenge of juggling with hundred of sanction, watch and regulatory lists. In light of that list mania for banking policing, list appears to have become the security device of choice in the everyday life of the financial industry across the world. Instead of reducing the complexity of security-finance dynamics to a zero-sum game (securitization of finance vs financialization of security), the article rather aims to question the critical role of lists in the cross-colonization of finance and security. Drawing on empirical research in the United Kingdom and India, the article adopts an ‘analytics of devices’ to think of and analyse banking policing practices through the instrumentation that makes these practices possible and stable over time. It argues that banking appropriation of security lists both (re)configures lists ‘social identity’ and banking actors’ power-relations in the fields of finance and security. Ultimately, the analytical focus on lists appropriation sheds new light on what securing circulation means in finance.
What do security barriers do beyond blockading or demarcating territory? This article argues for an understanding of security barriers as sociotechnical devices. It argues for a rearticulation of security barriers as more than territorial technologies or the products and producers of sovereign power. It advances the discussion of security barriers beyond what can be thought of as a ‘geopolitics of security’, where the referent object is territory, and asks that we also consider how they work with mobility as productive devices to govern people in a variety of ways. The article empirically analyses the fences of Ceuta and Melilla, the barriers of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, and the US counterinsurgency fence in Falluja. Building on these illustrative cases, the article argues that security barriers should be understood as products of particular modes of government and producers of particular populations through their ability to perform interruptions and capture data.
This book examines the role of criminal law in the enforcement of immigration controls over the last two decades in Britain. The criminalization of immigration status has historically served functions of exclusion and control against those who defy the state’s powers over its territory and population. In the last two decades, the powers to exclude and punish have been enhanced by the expansion of the catalogue of immigration offences and their more systematic enforcement.
This is the first intensive study of the Bow Street runners, a group of men established by Henry Fielding, in the middle of the eighteenth century with the financial support of the government to confront violent offenders on the streets and highways around London. They were developed over the following decades by his half-brother, John Fielding, into what became a well-known and stable group of officers who acquired skill and expertise in investigating crime, tracking and arresting offenders, and in presenting evidence at the Old Bailey, the main criminal court in London. They were, I argue, detectives in all but name. At the same time, Fielding created a magistrates' court that for the first time was open to the public at stated times every day. A second, intimately related theme in the book concerns attitudes and ideas about the policing of London more broadly, particularly from the 1780s, when the detective and prosecutorial work of the runners came to be increasingly opposed by arguments in favour of the prevention of crime by surveillance and other means. The last three chapters of the book continue to follow the runners' work, but at the same time they are concerned with discussions of the larger structure of policing in London - in parliament, in the Home Office, and in the press. These discussions were to intensify after 1815, in the face of a sharp increase in criminal prosecutions. They led - in a far from straightforward way - to a fundamental reconstitution of the basis of policing in the capital by Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police act of 1829. The runners were not immediately affected by the creation of the New Police, but indirectly it led to their disbandment a decade later.
This book seeks to give a comprehensive theory of policing. To set out the background for such a theory, the diverse types of agencies involved in policing, the history of policing, and the representations of policing in the press and in police literature are examined. The police are then defined by their use of a wide array of means, including violence, which are prohibited as legal violations for all other citizens. This definition is tested in the subsequent chapters bearing on the main components of the police web. First, the public police working in uniform are described in respect of who they are, what part of their activities are devoted to crime control, and the ways in which they operate. Second, criminal investigators are put in focus and empirical findings on how they clear up cases are discussed. The security and intelligence services are the subject of the next chapter, which develops a model that contrasts "high policing" (intelligence services) with "low policing" (public constabularies). The following chapter addresses the crucial issues that relate to private security, stressing the uncertainty of our current knowledge, and proposes a fully developed model integrating public and private security. The last chapter is devoted to military policing in its democratic and undemocratic variants, and to the extra-legal social control exercised by criminal organizations such as the Mafia. In conclusion, the book tries to link the theoretical issues raised throughout the book and make his position explicit with respect to all of them.
The collection considers the growing importance of the border as a prime site for state activity and the impact of such activity on human rights and global justice. It explores how state activity on the border simultaneously creates and responds to crime, criminalizing individuals who irregularly cross borders while ignoring far more harmful cross border activities committed by powerful actors. This book extends understandings of borders in order to make sense of the shifts in the ways states exercise power and control over activities that are connected to or impact on borders, and the consequences of these actions, particularly for vulnerable groups. Covering subjects from e-trafficking, child soldiers, the 'global war on terror' in Africa and police activities that generate crime, this collection analyses material on a broad range of issues related to transnational crime and countermeasures from North American, European and Australian sources.
This article challenges the assumption that border officers enjoy a high level of discretion. By studying customs, it provides insight into how the policing of goods and transport workers is less concerned with ‘risky’ individuals than it is with promoting international trade flows. In this context, border officer discretion may be seen as a hindrance that must be channeled or curtailed. Interviews with Canadian customs officers demonstrate that technologies facilitate the redistribution of compliance and risk management responsibilities among border policing actors. Such alterations in customs operations have reconfigured discretion in paradoxical ways, both extending and reducing officers’ hold on decision-making. This article considers the effects of these changes on officers’ use, experience and perception of discretion as well as on their occupational identity.
Throughout the world, resources are being shifted towards border enforcement. Along with the concerted political and financial investment afforded by states into defending territories, the apparatus of border policing comprises of numerous state agencies and an ever-expanding range of private actors and commercial bodies. Yet an examination of the culture and practices of those responsible for the routine preservation of border priorities has garnered surprisingly little attention within the sociology of policing. In this research note, I foreground an agenda intended to extend current research and reflection on the everyday policing and surveillance of borders. My starting point is that the policing of borders is undergoing significant changes but without the accompanying scrutiny by policing scholars. Drawing on examples from the USA and Europe, my overarching claim is that as policing and security governance on the border becomes more innovative and pluralistic, policing scholars need to engage in sustained ethnographic fieldwork to track how security frameworks are realised at the local level and acted out against national environments. In so doing, policing scholarship can lead the way in developing a more holistic understanding of border practices with a view to redressing the social injustice experienced by those at the receiving end of contemporary border regimes.
This essay examines the restructuring of policing currently taking place in developed democratic societies. It argues that restructuring is occurring under private as well as government auspices and will have profound effects on public safety, equity, human rights, and accountability. These effects are discussed, along with the trade-offs they represent for public policy. The driving forces behind restructuring are fear of crime, the inability of government to satisfy society's longing for security, the commodification of security, the rise of mass private property, and cultural individualism. The essay concludes with a prediction about the future of policing and suggests policies that are needed to avoid restructuring's harmful effects.
Current revelations about the secret US-NSA program, PRISM, have confirmed the large-scale mass surveillance of the telecommunication and electronic messages of governments, companies, and citizens, including the United States' closest allies in Europe and Latin America. The transnational ramifications of surveillance call for a re-evaluation of contemporary world politics' practices. The debate cannot be limited to the United States versus the rest of the world or to surveillance versus privacy; much more is at stake. This collective article briefly describes the specificities of cyber mass surveillance, including its mix of the practices of intelligence services and those of private companies providing services around the world. It then investigates the impact of these practices on national security, diplomacy, human rights, democracy, subjectivity, and obedience.
Focusing on a highly significant governmental intervention in the global financial market crisis – the US Treasury Department’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) of autumn 2008 – this article makes a threefold contribution to the growing literature concerned with the interstices of finance and security. First, the TARP is shown to have attempted to govern the turbulence not simply as a crisis of the markets, the banks and Wall Street, but as a problem of the biopolitical security of the US population. US$700 billion worth of toxic assets were to be purchased by the TARP in order to restore the opportunities afforded by uncertain global financial circulations for individual wealth and well-being. Second, by conceptualizing and exploring the TARP in Foucauldian terms as an ‘apparatus of security’, the article demonstrates how this concept can hold together analytical concerns with the biopolitical rationality of power, on the one hand, and the contingent, processual and lively forms taken by specific governmental orderings, on the other. The TARP apparatus certainly amounted to a biopolitical intervention in the crisis, but it only emerged from the relation between the discursive, material and institutional elements that made it possible. Third, the unplanned transformation of the TARP into an apparatus that targeted bank solvency and recapitalization rather than toxic assets is held, in effect, to have been a key moment that heralded a move towards techniques of preparedness and resilience designed to mitigate the dangers of uncertain global financial circulations.
Tracability as technique of governance of people and goods.
Didier Torny [51-75].
The traditional politics of territorial protection and isolation (quarantine) seem inefficient to face new emerging sanitary threats. To cope with dangers intertwined with growing movements of people and goods, we are witnessing the ongoing settlement of tracability as technique of governance. This article focuses on the practical constraints to build this tracability through the fields of prion diseases («mad cow disease», Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), blood transfusion and genetically engineered foods.
The globalizing world has been described as a `world in motion', permeated by transnational networks and flows of goods, capital, information and cultural symbols, as well as potentially risky individuals and substances. This article examines the implications of the various global mobilities for criminological theory, method and policy. The world of global networks and flows introduces new notions of social ordering and exclusion, as well as challenging the prevailing conceptions of society, community, culture and social belonging, while growing demands for control of global mobilities create a complex dynamics between the nation-state and the emerging `world risk society'.
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Our work Is our words, but our words do not work any more. They have not worked for some time. We can obviously start with the misleading label??International Politics??which is given to our subject. As a result of this problem, I have wanted to use increasing numbers of inverted commas; but most have never seen the light of day because copy-editors have regarded them as an over-indulgence. Even so, the very temptation of these little scratches indicates that words at the heart of the subject are i n trouble:
The pursuit of security as a matter of domestic policy stands high on the political agenda of many Western nations and is a booming area of private investment. This repays close attention to what is meant when the concept of security is invoked as a justification of public policy or private practice. This paper examines the various meanings and differing constructions of security as a negative or positive presence, as a material or symbolic good, as a public good or private service, and as a response to external or internal threats. It observes how the language of security is differentiated also according to local legal cultures and calls for comparative analysis of the meaning and usage of the term in different jurisdictions. It suggests some possible differences in the structural arrangements for the pursuit of security that arise from differing relationships among the state, private sector and civil society. And it concludes by mapping out some apparent variants on the public-private divide that might profitably inform comparative analysis of the practices, as opposed to the rhetoric, of security.
This article examines state-corporate organizational complexes within the transnational policing sphere. Its specific focus is upon the transnational security consultancy industry and its interaction with state security agencies. Exemplifying the proposed theoretical construct of state-corporate symbiosis, leading firms are held out as key facilitators for this ongoing close association between dominant interests. Their activities reflect how this security amalgamation imposes itself upon the agendas, discourse, methods and ideologies of the global policing environment. As well as highlighting the degree to which both behaviour and techniques traverse the state-corporate security nexus, this article also identifies core factors which have driven this convergence of interests. It concludes by suggesting that this evolution towards state-corporate symbiosis exacerbates those trends within transnational policing that prompt most concern, while undercutting those for which hope is harboured.
Sumario: Policing as risk communications -- Policing, risk and law -- Community policing and risk communications -- Risk discourse -- Risk institutions -- Risk and social change -- Tracing territories -- Mobilizing territories -- Territorial communities -- Securities -- Careers -- Identities -- Knowledge risk management -- Communication rules -- Communication formats -- Communication technologies Bibliografía: P. 453-470
Obra teórica de una sociología de las asociaciones, el autor se cuestiona sobre lo que supone la palabra social que ha sido interpretada con diferentes presupuestos y se ha hecho del mismo vocablo un nombre impreciso e inadecuado, además se ha materializado el término como quien nombra algo concreto, de manera que lo social se convierte en un proceso de ensamblado y un tipo particular de material. Propone retomar el concepto original para hacer las debidas conexiones y descubrir el contenido estricto de las cuestiones que están conectadas bajo la sociedad.
The article offers a descriptive analysis of strategies of crime control in contemporary Britain and elsewhere. It argues
that the normality of high crime rates and the limitations of criminal justice agencies have created a new predicament for
governments. The response to this predicament has been recurring ambivalence that helps explain the volatile and contradictory
character of recent crime control policy. The article identifies adaptive strategies (responsibilization, defining deviance
down, and redefining organizational success) and strategies of denial (the punitive sovereign response), as well as the different
criminologies that accompany them.
Introduction in Regulation Law
- Parker
Parker et al., 'Introduction in Regulation Law'.
Institutions of Privacy in the Detrmination
- Stinchcombe
Stinchcombe, 'Institutions of Privacy in the Detrmination'.
Report on the Theory of Risk
- Boy
Boy, Report on the Theory of Risk;
Fortified Enclaves'; and Brown, Walled States
- Caldeira
Caldeira, 'Fortified Enclaves'; and Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.
Questioning Security Devices
- Amicelle
Amicelle et al., 'Questioning Security Devices'.
The Rise of the Network
- Castells
Castells, The Rise of the Network.
16. See note 10 above.
The Paradox of Discretion'; and Loftus
- Côté-Boucher
Côté-Boucher, 'The Paradox of Discretion'; and Loftus, 'Border Regimes and the Sociology'.
The Cross-Colonization of Finance'; and De Goede
- Jacobsen Amicelle
Amicelle and Jacobsen, 'The Cross-Colonization of Finance'; and De Goede, Speculative
Security.
Inside Criminal Networks
- Morselli
Morselli, Inside Criminal Networks.
Policing the Waterfront
- Brewer
Brewer, Policing the Waterfront.
Bots, cops, and corporations
- Dupont
Dupont, 'Bots, cops, and corporations'.
Questions of Security
- Valverde
Valverde, 'Questions of Security,' 5.
The Concept of Security
- Zedner
Zedner, 'The Concept of Security,' 158.