Provisional Authority - Police, Order, and Security in India by Beatrice Jauregui

Provisional Authority - Police, Order, and Security in India by Beatrice Jauregui

Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic politics, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy.

Beatrice Jauregui is assistant professor at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. She is coeditor of the Handbook of Global Policing and Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226403700
ISBN 10	022640370X
Title	Provisional Authority - Police, Order, and Security in India
Author	Beatrice Jauregui
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Year published	2016-11-28
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.