Every car has an offence on it: Register polizeilichen Handelns bei Verkehrskontrollen in Nordghana
In: Sociologus, Jg. 61 (2011), Heft 2, S. 197-222
Online
academicJournal
- print; 26; 2 p.1/4
Zugriff:
Police traffic checks in West Africa are normally only mentioned with reference to corruption. Yet anthropological research of these everyday bureaucratic interactions can also develop how police officers implement the law, refer to morality and sociality. Police practices evolve in adaptation to internal and external conditions and must constantly be socially legitimized. On the everyday level, the police are not enforcers of the state's monopoly on violence, but must establish their dominance through negotiation. Thereby the discretion of police officers is guided by multiple rationalities or registers. In order to countervail uncertainties in specific situations they dynamically choose registers which are not clearly separated, and they often draw them simultaneously. Selecting violence, public order, formal law, or sociality enables heterogeneous and ambiguous police work, in the face of missing formal guidelines and low legitimacy of the police. Corruption can be understood as a special subset of police discretion, as deviant and functional practices at the margins of it. Law and social order remain meaningful during these interactions, even if they are ultimately violated. Since the actual use of registers is highly influenced by civilians, police rationality can be seen as the result of everyday negotiations. Civilians have considerable means of influencing the police through the use of violence, connections, status and money. Police action cannot be understood as unilateral enforcement of either the state's laws or private interests; rather it is open to expectations and social beliefs of civilians. Adaptation and openness of police practices reveal that the implementation of laws and the reproduction of social order are co-produced by civilians, which enables a new perspective on police practices inside and outside of West Africa.
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Every car has an offence on it: Register polizeilichen Handelns bei Verkehrskontrollen in Nordghana
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | BEEK, Jan |
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Zeitschrift: | Sociologus, Jg. 61 (2011), Heft 2, S. 197-222 |
Veröffentlichung: | Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2011 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
Umfang: | print; 26; 2 p.1/4 |
ISSN: | 0038-0377 (print) |
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