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Policing and Governance

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Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Discipline Core NSLG1EL108 4

Semester and Year Offered : Winter Semester

Course Coordinator and Team : 

Email of the coarse coordinator : psatyogi[at]aud[dot]ac[dot]in

Pre-requisites: None

Does the course connect to, build on or overlap with any other courses offered in AUD?

The course sits adjacent to the core courses on constitutional debates and themes and legal history offered by the school. The focus of this course will be on the manner in which scholars have theorized policing and social control as well as the practice and the institution of policing. It is an interdisciplinary course that will equip the students to understand the place of policing in the systems governance and administration

  • Specific requirements on the part of students who can be admitted to this course:(Pre requisites; prior knowledge level; any others – please specify) None
  • No. of students to be admitted (with justification if lower than usual cohort size is proposed): As per AUD norms
  • Course scheduling: (summer/winter course; semester-long course; half-semester course; workshop mode; seminar mode; any other – please specify) Semester-long course/seminar mode
  • Proposed date of launch:Winter 2021

How does the course link with the vision of AUD and the specific programme(s) where it is being offered?

The course takes up the question of governance and administration through policing and attempts to engage the questions of citizens’ rights in the context of greater demands for securitization by the state.

Course Details:

Summary:War, neo-imperialism, police’s sexism, racism, casteism, tribalism, impunity, use of extraordinary laws, illegal detentions and custodial deaths and torture are not unfamiliar legacies in our current age. The contemporary is marked by a global intensification in racialised police violence, even as states today are ridden with anxieties about insufficient security and order. This anxiety sits adjacent to forms of surveillance that have increased manifold. With its attention to all these forms of violence that the police is identified with, this course will principally be concerned with (i) how the ideas of policing and surveillance have been productive for thinking the legitimacy and rationality of state’s governance and (ii) how policing, both as an institution and a bureaucracy, has developed over time . These two points are related, even as works that deal with the former do not always refer to actual works on the policing institution. Through these two themes, this course attempts to understand the development of policing in India and the challenges with respect to reforming policing institutions. The course will pay attention to how the police themselves are conditioned into their mandate of keeping order and security, what meanings order and security have for them and the conditions under which these have to be achieved.

The course has five modules.

Module 1 examines scholarly work on policing that characterises policing as a profession and raises questions about whether policing is an adequate thematic to think the nature of states.Module 2 foregrounds the development of police and its bureaucratic practices in colonial India and thinks whether the argument of colonial continuity is an appropriate thematic to think postcolonial policing. The focus of Module 3 is on post- independence policing in India. It examines questions of police delegitimization, politicisation and violence in contemporary India. Module 4 is focussed on the enduring question of police reforms in India. Module 5 delineates new modalities and tools of policing and open up the question of whether it is possible to imaging policing without police personnel.

 ​​​​​Objectives

The course intends to understand and questions contemporary issues about governance by placing them within the needs for greater securitization.

Courses Outcomes: At the end of this course, the students will be able to

  • To understand the development of police in India and to understand the issue of police reforms
  • To understand how policing as a philosophical concern has been mobilized to understand state power
  • To understand the logic of anthropological interventions in the study of policing institutions and the questions anthropology throws for studying police.
  • To read some contemporary anthropological works on policing from varying contexts
  • To understand the evolution of global policing and securitization in the world

Overall structure

Module 1The first module of the course opens up the question about thinking policing as both a form of description of what policing is on the ground and a normative aspiration about how it ought to be. These questions sit at the heart of policing in so far as they tie into normative accounts of government, law and moral obligation and considerations raised particularly by the social contractualists:  Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The concerns about moral rights allows the course to ask whether it is adequate to theorise policing in terms of law enforcement, or protection of the State, or keeping peace. It is, for instance, possible for all these three conditions to be satisfied also in the context of extreme authoritarianism. Protection of rights enshrined in law, where law reflects the will of the people, become the conditions under which we will delineate the relationship between goals of policing and ensuring the protection of justifiably enforceable moral rights.

 

Weeks 1-2

  • Bierschenk, Thomas. “Police and State”. In Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui, Ian Loader and Jonny Steinberg (eds.) Sage Handbook of Global Policing. Sage Publications, (2016): 155-178
  • Bittner, Egon. “The capacity to use force as the core of the police role”. In Frederick Elliston & Michael Feldberg (eds.), Moral Issues in Police Work. Rowman & Allanheld. (1985): 15-25
  • Jacobs, Jonathan. “Police, the Rule of Law, And Civil Society: A Philosophical Perspective”. In Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui, Ian Loader and Jonny Steinberg (eds.) Sage Handbook of Global Policing. Sage Publications, (2016): 82:102
  • Miller, Seumas. “Political Theory, Institutional Purpose and Policing”. In Ben Bradford, Beatrice Jauregui, Ian Loader and Jonny Steinberg (eds.) Sage Handbook of Global Policing. Sage Publications, (2016): 13-28
  • Skurski, Julie and Fernando Coronil. “Introduction: States of Violence and the Violence of States”. In Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski (eds.) States of Violence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, (2006): 1-31.

Module 2 The focus of the second module is on colonial policing and seeks to delineate how in varies social and political circumstances, colonial police forces played a vital role in the maintenance of authority of the colonial state, and in upholding law and order during the process of disengaging and transferring power to the new rulers. It charts how colonial policing gradually changed from a local to a metropolitan concern as the legitimacy of the colonial rule came under increase challenge amidst growing political instability. It is in the latter stages of coloniality that we see a diversification and expansion in the role of the police, which continues into postcolonial conditions: frontline work to suppress the nationalist movements, surveillance, intelligence, setting up of specialised branches, to name a few. The post first world war period also provides generative conditions for the policing question to be posed as a labour question from the constabulary that often threatens to go on strike, creating panic within the colonial powers about the loss of control over the institution that had become vital to suppress nationalist struggles. Policing as labour only intermittently occupies public space in the post-colonial period and this module raises questions about why this might have been the case.

Weeks 3-4

  • Arnold, David. “The Armed Police and Colonial Rule in South India, 1914—1947.” Modern Asian Studies 11.1 (1977): 101-125.
  • Arnold, David. “Police Power and the demise of British rule in India, 1930-47”. In David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds.), Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917-65. Manchester University Press (1992): 42-61
  • Brogden, Mike. “The Emergence of the Police – the Colonial Dimension”. British Journal of Criminology. 27(1), (1987): 4-14.
  • Das, Dilip K., and Arvind Verma. "The armed police in the British colonial tradition." Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management (1998).
  • Sekhri, Abhinav. “From ‘Bully Boys’ to ‘Willing Servants’: Police, the Third Degree, and Indian Courts: 1861-1961.” Available at SSRN 3174042 (2018)
  • Shil, Partha Pratim. "The ‘Threatened ‘Constabulary Strikes of Early Twentieth-Century Bengal." South Asian Studies 33, no. 2 (2017): 165-179.

Module 3 This module focusses on policing in post-colonial India. Since police falls in the state list, this module will examine questions of police violence as it ties into state politics. The range of questions that police violence throws are, however, generalisable: caste and minority violence, police complicity in riots, police and sexual violence, and police in militarised regions. The readings in this module are a combination of some recent ethnographies on Indian policing and literature that has emerged out of civil rights activism. Students will be encouraged to think targeted violence that the police are capable of deploying at the behest of politicisation.

Weeks 5-7

  • Ayyub, Rana.  Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up. (e-copy, selections)
  • Balagopal, K. “People's War and the Government: Did the Police Have the Last Laugh?.” Economic and Political Weekly(2003): 513-519.
  • Balagopal, K. “Terrorism of the police kind.” A combat law Anthology, writings on human rights, law and society in India, selections from combat law (2002-2010) (2011): 88-90.
  • Fazili, Gowher. "Police Subjectivity in Occupied Kashmir: Reflections on an Account of a Police Officer." Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (2018): 184-2-6
  • Geetha, V. “Whom and why do the police kill? Thinking Violence with K. Balagopal”. http://www.socialsciencecollective.org/telling-the-truth-part-3/
  • Jauregui, Beatrice. "Cultures of legitimacy and postcolonial policing: Guest editor introduction." Law & Social Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2013): 547-552.
  • Jauregui, Beatrice. “Orderly Ethics”. In Provisional authority: Police, order, and security in India. University of Chicago Press, 2016: 60-82
  • Kazi, Seema. “Rape, impunity and justice in Kashmir.” Socio-Legal Review. 10 (2014): 14-22
  • Subramanian, Kadayam Suryanarayanan. “State-sponsored Violence against the Muslims in Gujarat, 2002: A Case Study in Police Partisanship”. In Political violence and the police in India. SAGE Publications India, (2007): 170-191.
  • SJ, Ambrose Pinto. "Atrocities on Dalits in Gulbarga: Upper Caste Hold on Police." Economic and Political Weekly (1994): 897-899.

Module 4 The question of police reforms in India goes back to colonial period that saw strikes by police officials in the 1920s. The period after independence saw police strikes in the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These were moments of political mobilizations from within the police aimed at addressing work related conditions. The National Police Commissions set up in the 1970s and 80s did little to implement that work conditions for police officials. Over time, the questions of police reform has got tied to politicisation of the institution, legal immunities enjoyed by the police which hinder their prosecution, violation of procedure and use of indiscriminate violence. The tension that inheres here is in thinking policing as a profession and police being the coercive arm of the state that increasingly uses violence upon its own people. The module on reforms addresses both these questions are argues for the inseparability of these two modalities of reform.

Weeks 8-10

Module 5 Taking the contemporary as a moment to think emerging policing practices, this module asks students to ponder over what policing without police personnel would like. From focussing on tools of police that make policing more managerial and technology driven, how might the question of violence be posed especially with respect to impunity, which begins to acquire a more dispersed form. And, yet, technologies index to social profiles or, rather, create profiles, leading to a more complicated rendering of both senses of violation and, also, culpability. The increasing technologization of policing sits adjacent to calls for abolishing policing. How do calls for defunding the police sit with policing in the sub-continent? Some of these issues are addressed in this last module, which opens up more questions about thinking the place of policing in the present moment.

Weeks 11-12

  • Zia, Ather. "Blinding Kashmiris: The Right to Maim and the Indian Military Occupation in Kashmir." Interventions 21, no. 6 (2019): 773-786.
  • Davis, Oliver. "Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing." Security Dialogue 50, no. 4 (2019): 344-360.
  • Fussey, Pete, Bethan Davies, and Martin Innes. "‘Assisted’ Facial Recognition and the Reinvention of Suspicion and Discretion in Digital Policing." The British Journal of Criminology (2020).
  • Joh, Elizabeth E. "The new surveillance discretion: Automated suspicion, big data, and policing." Harvard Law. & Policy Review. 10 (2016): 15.
  • Maguire, Mark. “The Birth of Biometric Security”. Anthropology Today 25(2), (2009): 9-14.
  • Rios, Jodi. Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020) (Introduction: Dancing with Death; Chapter 3: Racial States and Local Governance; (e-book is free at the Cornell University Press)

Pedagogy:

 

  1.  
  • Instructional design: combination of lectures, participation and presentations.
  • Special needs (facilities, requirements in terms of software, studio, lab, clinic, library, classroom/others instructional space, any other- please specify)
  • Expertise in AUD faculty or outside
  • Linkages with external agencies (e. g., with field-based organizations, hospital; any others)
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