‘There should be no open doors in the police’: criminal investigations in northern Ghana as boundary work

ABSTRACTIn criminal investigations by police officers in northern Ghana, the lines are fluid: civilians arrest suspects on their own, assuming the tasks of the police. Police officers are heavily influenced by civilians, often forming paid alliances with them. Yet such entanglements paradoxically enable state policing and integrate the police into society in a context of low resources and low legitimacy. Other practices limit and frame such transgressions. Using the concept of boundary work, this article analyses how actors maintain and negotiate the seemingly blurred distinction between state and society in West Africa.

Sentiment, Reason, and Law: Policing in the Republic of China on Taiwan by Jeffrey T. Martin. Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime, and Governance Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 186 pp.

Police violence in West Africa : Perpetrators' and ethnographers' dilemmas

This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally and morally justified violence can be a source of long-term legitimacy; but because of multiple possible readings of a certain situation (according to different, conflicting moral and legal discourses), the very same action has potentially delegiti…

Mapping out an anthropology of defrauding and faking

Neoliberalism and the moral economy of fraud

In the popular imaginary, corrupt officials and criminal elites have populated the global South – and especially Africa – since the 1980s. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and with the...