ABSTRACT
Policing is a form of social control, or response to a grievance (Black 1996: 5). It is third-party intervention in the name of authority into social relations, and has a long history pertaining to the control of territories and of people. Indeed, in many ways policing has its origins in the military notion of winning, maintaining and expanding control over ground or territory. In the contemporary ‘information age’ this aspect must be reconsidered. Considerable literature on policing and on the nature of the state exists, and some important and stylish work articulates origins of relationships between policing and the state (Bayley 1975), and there is a growing amount of published work on transnational policing (Benyon et al. 1993; Fijnaut 1993; Nadelmann 1993; Harding et al. 1995; Sheptycki 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998a and b). However, a considerable portion of this literature is descriptive, is limited to concerns about drug law enforcement, or simply explicates the formal structure of such police organisations and their potential powers (Anderson 1989; Anderson et al. 1995; Harding et al. 1995). These works question connections between authority, territory and policing, conventional wisdom since Weber’s tracing of relationships between the state, law and the legitimate use of force (Brewer et al. 1988). What they tend to show is that Weber’s analysis will no longer suffice as a guide to systematic empirical work on emerging patterns and processes of transnational policing. Let us consider some of the ambiguities of Weber’s formulation.
Previous definitions of policing should be reconsidered. Sheptycki (1995) argues correctly that previous definitions of policing imply the existence of a bounded, designated and named territory within which a policing mandate is executed. Recent changes in social organisation signal that, while quite distinctive national, international and transnational police mandates exist (the map), legally constituted policing organisations and the actual ground to be controlled (the territory), are simultaneously shifting. Nation-states and associated police forces may not map, much less control, the territory they claim governance over.
‘Territory’ and ‘control’ are not always correlated and this is well dramatised in the case of transnational policing. Control remains a heady mixture of economic power and legal justification, as recent American invasions of Panama, Grenada, and sporadic undeclared war on Iraq, Colombia and in Kosovo well illustrate. In this context it would do to note that, while UN forces were bombing Kosovo in early 1999, delegations were sent from the US to instruct Kosovars in ‘democratic policing’ (Gall 1999).
The role of force in bringing about compliance is subtle, especially when the area or behaviour policed is not within the bounds of a nation-state. Bittner’s (1970) notion that policing is the means of distributing situationally applied force defines as essential to policing what is an empirical question. This is even more true at the transnational level. Generally speaking, force is less significant than the threat of such, and symbolic force, threats and words, are as central to much policing as physical or weapons-based coercion. More agencies than the police apply force and, in transnational policing, this may mean quite routine involvement of military and security services which bring with them rather different traditions and customs with regards to coercive action. While policing in the Anglo-American world has traditionally succeeded on the basis of minimal force, there is no guarantee that this model will achieve priority as policing is elevated to the transnational domain. The role of the American armed forces in domestic policing, their international role in drug control, and as ‘peacekeepers’ obscures the line between domestic, national and international policing mandates. The analytic task thus becomes to explain the conditions under which, and frequency with which, force is applied.
The state as a holder of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is problematic, as even Weber recognised (Rheinstein 1954/1969: 5–10). In the contemporary period, private policing forces outnumber those of the public police, and the armed (and continually arming) American population probably possesses far more conventional firepower than do police forces. This balance of terror may be swinging back in favour of the police as they militarise (Kraska and Kappeler 1997; Haggerty and Ericson 1999). The relations between community ‘vigilantes’ and state police have particular salience in a number of locations, including Northern Ireland, South Africa and the USA and there is reason to think that the list of policy options being explored by state programmers are being pursued in a variety of transnational forums (Brogden and Shearing 1993; Cohen 1995, 1996). On the other hand, the state’s monopoly of policing-type powers has also been ceded in large measure to the ‘in-house’ security providers of multinational corporations and to private security providers (see Johnston, this volume). Insofar as the sociology of policing does not identify which agencies in a given domain use force and when, it remains impoverished.
Global policing, as Sheptycki (1998b) notes, reveals various extensions of the quasi-legitimate application of force across borders in non-war conditions. Furthermore, as Bourdieu (1977) dramatises, the nature of violence is changing. Violence now includes ‘symbolic violence’, the destruction of meanings, connections, continuity through invisible domination. It should be noted that Bourdieu focuses on the ways domestic institutions blind citizens to the destruction of their own epistemological shelters, or conspire in their own dependency, by legitimising and officially cloaking violence in euphemisms (Bourdieu 1977: 190ff). The application of violence to those who do not share a habitus is less problematic and this has profound implications for the continuing evolution of transnational policing.
The concept of property and its protection, a traditional rationale for policing, is changing. It is widely acknowledged that information is property, a commodity to be bought and sold at a cost, a source of conflict, secrecy and competition between corporations, states and individuals. The amplification and magnification of the importance of ‘intellectual property’ for contemporary capitalism remains unremarked in the literature on policing, and yet it clearly has considerable implications for the police mission. For example, the term ‘counterfeiting’ is usually taken to relate to the production of illegitimate banknotes, but in the contemporary period police are likely to be exercised by the illegitimate production and distribution of designer clothing, computer software, CDs and other items that have value as ‘intellectual property’ (cf. Aoki 1998).
