Provisional Authority

Police, Order, and Security in India

By: Beatrice Jauregui

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Hardcover | 28 November 2016 | Edition Number 1

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This ethnography of everyday policing practices in Lucknow, a major Indian metropolis, demonstrates how police authority and its assumed afflictions are refracted through a multi-dimensional field of social relationships in which power positions and moral boundaries are continually contested and shifting. This field generates among police what legal anthropologist Beatrice Jauregui calls provisional authority," a fractured and contingent form of capability and subjectivity that is not always immediately visible or comprehensible. Provisional authority may provide a social good, but with questionable and transmutable efficacy or legitimacy. Drawing on scholarship from anthropology, legal history, sociology, and political theory, Jauregui considers prevalent problems like routinized corruption, bureaucratized cronyism, evidence fabrication and extralegal violence among police as expressions of strategic adaptation and often a sincere if failing attempt to perform what officers themselves consider real" police work in the face of interference, incapacity, disaffection and fragmented knowledge. This analysis of the fraught nature of police authority in India pushes contemporary theories of state power, legality and legitimacy, and postcolonialism and decolonization in different and provocative directions, opening new vistas for understanding policing as a global historical practice hybridizing local, statist, and transnational modes of producing and performing authority and order. Provisional Authority offers an innovative and challenging read of classical and contemporary theories of the postcolonial state, and an incisive perspective on public order in relation to police authority as co-configured by practice and subjectivity.

Industry Reviews

"...Provisional authority excellently contextualizes police practices and perceptions within the fabric of everyday and political life, revealing Indian policing to be a precarious activity carried out by individuals who are unavoidably entwined within larger societal struggles."--David Sausdal "Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"
"Provisional Authority is marvelous. It is clearly the best ethnographic book on the Indian police ever written. Jauregui writes incisively about both theory and practice, interweaving frontline stories with larger theoretical points and analysis. She shows the living reality of Indian police at the 'coal face', brilliantly laying out the nuanced problems of access and observer involvement in India."-- "David H. Bayley, author of Governing the Police: Experience in Six Democracies"
"In splendidly clear and incisive prose, Jauregui takes us to the 'cutting edge' of everyday policing in North India. This is a surprising and sometimes violent world where, as she lucidly explains, authority is always in the end in some sense 'provisional.' Jauregui's fieldwork is genuinely pathbreaking, while her theoretical analysis unerringly swerves away from the received cliches that too often dominate writing on the postcolonial state. Like all great books, Provisional Authority has created its own genre--a genre in which Hindi noir meets the banalities of everyday life in the police barracks and tea shops of Uttar Pradesh. The result is a terrific book that is at once highly readable and intellectually challenging."--Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh

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