Postcolonial IR Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

‘Contemporary policing not only has a global reach…it is also globally made’, note the editors when introducing The Global Making of Policing. In doing so, they contrast two different ways of thinking about the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’. The first one approaches the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’ as a unidirectional and top-down flow of goods and ideas from the North to the South. Labelled here as the ‘export’ approach, this way of thinking about the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’ focuses on the ways in which those policing practices designed to produce social order in Western Europe and North America are exported elsewhere through training (academic and practical). The second approach considers the role of the periphery or the South as a ‘laboratory’, and focuses on how those in the North have developed their theories and practices through seeking to produce order in the South. In this latter approach, the flow of goods and ideas is not unidirectional, but the relationship is nevertheless top-down with limited agency granted to the South. Another difference between the two approaches is that the ‘laboratory’ approach sees the North and the South as coeval, in contrast to the ‘export’ approach, which temporalizes difference and spatializes time by treating the South as belonging to the past, in need of growing up, with a little bit of help from the North.
The editors offer the ‘laboratory’ approach to highlight the limitations of the ‘export’ approach, noting that policing gets made globally—through interactions between the North and the South. The following suggests that the volume goes further than what can be seen through the prism of these two approaches. I identify a third, ‘co-constitutive’ approach, which focuses on how both sides interact with and learn from each other, while getting transformed in the process. Whereas the ‘laboratory' approach looks at how ‘we’ develop theories, go test them elsewhere (on our distant ‘others’) and come back home to apply them (on our near ‘others’), the ‘co-constitutive’ approach views the roles played by both sides in the production of goods and ideas, and their mutual transformation through this interaction.
In one sense, the ‘co-constitutive’ approach is already a part of the volume’s theoretical framework, as outlined by the editors in the introduction, discussed more explicitly by Laffey & Nadarajah and Tickner & Morales, rather implicitly by Mueller, and illustrated by Graham & Barker. Yet, I will suggest that the significance of watching against conflating the ‘laboratory’ and ‘co-constitutive’ approaches cannot be overemphasized. Before doing so, I will highlight the volume’s contribution to IR by underscoring how policing gets to be globally made. I will then turn to IR’s postcolonial critics to unpack ‘the global’ and, following Himadeep Muppidi (2004), call for integrating a ‘postcolonial understanding of globality’ into the study of the making of policing.