ABSTRACT
The starting point here is a previous essay in which I introduced the notion of a ‘constabulary ethic’ to the literature on transnational policing and tied it to the nascent rubric of ‘human security’. The reason for choosing to write about the ‘Constabulary Ethic and the Transnational Condition’ (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007: 31-71) was a perceived gap in the literature. There has been sustained examination of what is wrong with the institutions of social ordering and the best of this work is global in its intellectual and practical reach. This interdisciplinary socio-legal scholarship has frequently paid considerable attention to processes of reconciliation and restorative justice; it has done remarkable things in terms of exposing the abuses of police power around the world; and this academic work has dove-tailed very well with human-rights activists and the nexus of NGOs in which these actors are embedded (Downes et al. 2007). The cue for this work was ‘a triple loyalty: first an overriding obligation to honest intellectual enquiry itself … second, a political commitment to social justice; and third (and potentially conflicting with both), the pressing
and immediate demands for short-term help’ (Cohen 1998: 122). The watchwords for this intellectual project could have been taken from ancient Roman statecraft’s si vis pacem, para iustitiam (loosely translated ‘if you want peace, prepare justice’; cf. Reiner 2007: 418).
