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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Outsourcing Policing in Post-Conflict Mozambique: chiefs, community policing and state sponsored vigilantism in a former war-zone.
| Panel |
11. Alternative policing - new initiatives or established patterns of self-help?
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| Paper ID | 48 |
| Author(s) |
Kyed, Helene Maria
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | As other post-conflict societies, Mozambique has undergone a liberal-style democratic transition since the beginning of the 1990s. In this process, official attempts to democratize and demilitarize the National Police Force (PRM) have been key elements. Almost a decade of donor-funded reformation of the state police however saw a police force that still lacked the capacity and popular legitimacy to curb the rising levels of crime. Outsourcing of policing to non-state authorities and popular participation in security provisions have since the turn of the millennium been cast as solutions to this impasse. In the rural areas traditional and other community leaders were from 2002 formally drawn into assisting the state police with core policing functions. This coincided with the introduction of state-sponsored ‘vigilança do povo’ (people’s vigilance), where each citizen was encouraged to assist the police in identifying troublemakers. In the urban areas donor-sponsored pilot-project community policing forums were launched in 1999. In 2004-5 these forums was extended to cover the whole national territory, including also the rural areas. These initiatives have officially been launched under the headings of ‘Community-Police Links’ and ‘Unity between Police and the People’, promising enhanced security, a more democratic police force and inclusion of citizens in security provisions.
Based on a long-term ethnographic study of every-day policing, this paper explores how the different forms of outsourcing policing have been put into practice in a former war-zone of central Mozambique. Empirical data suggest that we need to critically scrutinise the inclusionary and democratic language in which the outsourcing of policing has been officially cast. Whereas community policing and the delegation of policing functions to traditional leaders suggest an improvement of state police capacity to deal with criminals, it has been accompanied by new forms of violence and exclusion. Rather than creating forums for citizens’ participation in crime prevention, community policing has become a means by which the state police draw young men and elderly leaders into performing arrests, punishing trespassers with force and daily patrolling the movements of people. This is furthermore entangled with a particular ‘politics of policing’ where the slogan of ‘Unity between Police and People’ revolves around modes of inclusion and exclusion, defined according to the old war factions between Renamo and the Frelimo state.
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