Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses twilight policing, which refers to a performative, punitive, disciplinary, and exclusionary policing style that is executed in a twilight zone between state and non-state by armed response officers in Durban, South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the everyday policing practices of armed response officers, a specific group of private security officers, in Durban, South Africa and is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork. Founded on the concept of twilight institutions (Lund 2006), this paper argues that armed response officers are engaged in twilight policing, a policing style that is performative, punitive, disciplinary, and exclusionary and operates in a twilight zone between state and non-state. Twilight policing is analyzed as the performance of sovereign power that is the result of the imbrication of public and private sovereign bodies. Although operating as private actors steered by market forces, armed response officers are increasingly operating in public spaces and incorporating particular "languages of stateness" (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). In doing so, they are challenging the state police through a competition over authority and legitimacy, yet they are simultaneously strengthening understandings of the state by mimicking the state and supplementing them through informal and formal partnerships. This multifaceted relationship with the state points towards a set of practices and processes that continuously cut across the intersections of state-non-state, legal-illegal, and formal-informal. Through focusing on a particular case study, this paper argues that policing in South Africa at large should be analyzed as an entanglement of public and private policing practices. Furthermore, focus should be placed on understanding and dissecting when, where, and how these entanglements occur and how they produce multistranded sovereign practices.