Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Jauregui, Beatrice, author

Title Provisional authority : police, order, and security in India / Beatrice Jauregui
Published Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016

Copies

Description 1 online resource (ix, 205 pages)
Contents Police and provisionality -- Corruptible virtue -- Orderly ethics -- Expendable servants -- Bureaucratic politics -- States of insecurity
Summary Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy. Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-191) and index
Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed October 12, 2016)
Subject Uttar Pradesh (India). Police Department.
SUBJECT Uttar Pradesh (India). Police Department fast
Subject Police -- India -- Lucknow
Justice, Administration of -- Social aspects -- India -- Lucknow
Police corruption -- India -- Lucknow
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Infrastructure.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
Justice, Administration of -- Social aspects
Police
Police corruption
India -- Lucknow
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780226403847
022640384X