ABSTRACT

This is a book about policing in Africa. It is about policing as an activity rather than being confined to the police as an organisation. It is about policing, whether by state or non-state groups, and its response. to challenges to internal order and security from both serious crime and from rebellion. It is a deliberate attempt to bring together what are normally separate, namely state and non-state law enforcement and criminal and rebel lawlessness. Not that those divisions are not useful, but here the choice is to consider the similarities, rather than the differences. In the course of the book it will be seen that, in practice, the boundaries are not so clear-cut as often imagined.