Paper short abstract:

The Nigeria Police Force work in a public sphere characterised by pluralities. The paper uses historical and ethnographic evidence to show how police creatively use this mix of institutions, jurisdictions, procedures and norms to achieve their wider aims of preserving peace and their own position.

Paper long abstract:

Police forces are an arm of the state dedicated to regulating social behaviour and preventing actions deemed incompatible with the common good. Yet, and especially in plural postcolonial societies such as Nigeria, they must do this with reference to multiple definitions of the common good. The state's definition, embedded in the corpus of formal laws, has a powerful normative hold even while publics recognise that governments and constituted authorities themselves are often built on foundations of problematic legitimacy. Alongside the law, communities maintain longstanding self-defined principles of what is legitimate and illegitimate. And the police themselves are not a 'neutral' category, having not only their own professional sense of morality and legitimacy, but also powerful institutional and personal reasons to promote certain outcomes and avoid others. Meanwhile, other agents, both state and non-state, offer alternative avenues for resolution and redress of which police forces must be cognisant. This paper aims to trace the contours and distribution of police power in Nigeria, by looking at both historical and contemporary examples where the Nigeria Police Force can be seen to creatively work with these pluralities, outside the formal procedures of the criminal justice system, to preserve an overall goal of maintaining or restoring social peace. The system as a whole produces a paradoxical result - a perennially dynamic and fluid system of policing as social action and mixed jurisdiction, which is however itself comparatively stable.