Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the performance of twilight policing, a policing style executed by a specific group of private security officers in Durban, South Africa. This paper highlights how ethnographic fieldwork among security officers provides tremendous insight into social securitization processes.

Paper long abstract:

This research project focuses on a specific group of private security offices, namely armed reaction officers, and analyses their role in policing the streets of Durban, South Africa. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with participant observation as the chief research method, this research introduces the concept of twilight policing. Founded on the concept of twilight institution (Lund 2006), twilight policing is defined as policing that operates in a twilight zone between state and non-state, between public and private. This research argues that although operating as private agents, armed reaction officers are increasingly taking on state-like duties and ascribed varying degrees of public authority. Twilight policing is manifested through local security networks (Dupont 2004) between agents of both the public and private spheres, such as clients and police officers. Through analyzing the daily policing practices executed by armed reaction officers in various local security networks, insight is also gained into perceptions of fear and violence, descriptions of the dangerous 'other', and the prevalence of uncertainty and insecurity that both influence, and are the result of, larger processes of securitization in post-apartheid urban South Africa. By focusing on a specific policing agent, this research is therefore also an example of how anthropologists can contribute to larger understandings of security.