Racializing Security: Plural Policing and Differentiated Citizenship

ir/relevance of race seminar with Rivke Jaffe

Lecture

If protecting citizens and maintaining public order have traditionally been seen as core state functions, what does it mean when the state actively shares this monopoly and encourages "plural policing"?

Abstract

In cities across the world, people increasingly rely on a broad range of interconnected security providers: in addition to public security forces such as the police, they look to uniformed security guards, voluntary neighborhood watches, and armed vigilantes to safeguard their lives and property.
If protecting citizens and maintaining public order have traditionally been seen as core state functions, what does it mean when the state actively shares this monopoly and encourages "plural policing"? Instances of ethnic and racial profiling by the police are well documented, but we know much less about the role of private security providers in shaping racialized categories of danger and innocence.
This talk discusses the ERC-funded research project on security and citizenship that I have recently started, and presents some preliminary findings from Jamaica. The talk explores how the privatisation and pluralisation of security provision affects citizenship; I discuss how political subjectivities shift, and differentiated citizenship can become more entrenched, as a result of these modes of security governance.

About the lecturer

Dr. Rivke Jaffe is an associate professor at the Centre for Urban Studies and the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her anthropological research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, and specifically on the spatialization of power, difference and inequality within cities. Rivke has recently started a five-year research program on public-private security assemblages in Kingston, Jerusalem, Miami, Nairobi and Recife. This research, funded by an ERC Starting Grant and an NWO VIDI grant, investigates to what extent security assemblages function as hybrid governance structures, and the implications this has for how different groups enact and experience citizenship. 

About the Seminar Series

In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research. In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Webpage Seminar Series: http://bit.ly/VKg6tt 

Published by  AISSR