The Politics of Policing and Local Security Provision in the Global South

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The provision of security is foundational to the role of contemporary nation-states, and police are often the most tangible manifestation of state capacity for ordinary citizens. Police around the world – in both the Global North and South, spanning both democracies and autocracies – are increasingly adopting militarized and repressive tactics to manage local populations. Yet scholarly understandings of over-policing and its consequences draw largely from the United States and other wealthy democracies.

This panel, by contrast, brings together four innovative papers on security provision in the Global South – focusing on Uganda, Lebanon, Mexico, and Pakistan – to examine the effects of policing tactics on citizens’ understandings of the state and their own political efficacy. Collectively, these papers demonstrate that repressive or discriminatory policing tactics inadvertently sow mistrust in state institutions and empower other political actors offering alternative forms of protection.

Stedem draws on fieldwork from Lebanon to show how the politicization of state security agencies along sectarian lines affect citizens’ political attitudes. Malik and Lyon’s work on Pakistan, in turn, shows that pre-existing attitudes toward one’s own ethnic group mediate how people interface with police. Curtice examines a specific episode of contentious mobilization to show how intense repression affects popular attitudes toward state security. Finally, Puck provides a structural perspective on hybrid security provision, showing how a nascent set of security firms in Mexico blur the boundary between public and private policing.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• How Repression Affects Public Perceptions of Police: Evidence from Uganda - Travis B. Curtice, Drexel University

• Descriptive Representation and Expectations of Police Bias in the Global South - Nicholas Lyon, Stanford University; Mashail Aman Malik, Harvard University

• State Police for Hire: Examining Mexico’s Auxiliary and Banking Police Forces - Logan Puck, Bates College

• How Politicization Affects Police-Society Relations: Evidence from Lebanon - Kelly Stedem, Roanoke College

Discussant

• Christiana Moreira Parreira Princeton University