Provisional Authority. Police, Order, and Security in India. By Beatrice Jauregui. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016.

Abstract

Provisional Authority. Police, Order, and Security in India. By Beatrice Jauregui. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016.For many among us the idea of police authority being anything but secure would be novel. Shored up on the one hand by the state's monopoly of force and on the other by unwavering commitment from democratically elected governments, the notion that police authority may be in some way provisional barely merits thought. Indeed, the very firmness of this presumption is reinforced and made manifest by its occasional disruption, such as in the case of the violent protests against police brutality in the United States in recent years and the concomitant rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The exception confirms the rule.My first experience of the provisionality of police authority - its contingency and conditionality - took place on a very cold and bleak afternoon in January 2005 in the city of Srinagar, Kashmir, a disputed region of Northern India. As I stood in a city street an armored police vehicle rounded the corner and came upon a car double-parked, the driver at the wheel but the car blocking the way. The scene that followed undid my understanding and presumptions about policing. First, the driver of the police vehicle honked and honked, while the car driver studiously ignored the implicit demand to move on. Second, the policeman at the wheel exited the vehicle, lathi (long baton) in hand, smashed the offending driver's window, dragged him from the car and began to beat him on the ground. Third, thinking that my presence as a westerner might in some way temper the exercise of police violence I stepped forward, making myself clearly visible on the pavement. The police officer looked up at me, then got back down to the job of beating the errant driver. As the bloodied driver was shoved back behind the wheel to clear his obstruction I walked away, chastened yet powerless.Beatrice Jauregui's Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India considers each of these phenomena as well as a host of others based on more than two years' ethnographic fieldwork with police in India's largest and in many ways most complex state, Uttar Pradesh (pop. 200 million in 2011; were it a nation state, it would be the sixth largest by population in the world). Though a relatively short book, at just 158 pages, it is remarkably dense both with ideas - reframing in important ways the way we might think about police authority - and data. On the latter, the book provides what might become a textbook example of fine ethnographic work. Jauregui is a Hindi speaker and seems also to get the rough drift of a number of minor vernacular languages. Without these skills it is difficult to imagine a work of such depth and sensitivity being achievable. Reading this book as a criminologist engaged in a project to envision a new criminology unhooked from metropolitan master discourses, I felt I was seeing unfold before me new ways of thinking and new practices of research suitable for work in the global South.Jauregui's argument concerning the provisionality of police authority in India is far too complex and multidimensional to be summarized into a nutshell here (see pp. 142-44 for her own effort to achieve such a distillation). I will instead attempt to trace the broad contours of her approach. This begins with the relationship of police to the state and a vision of police authority that is less about a Weberian probability of obedience to command, or a routinized belief in its legitimacy, and more about shifting capabilities and evaluations of the provision of 'the good' and 'the goods'. (p. 16). Though she seems at pains at a number of points to distinguish her conclusions from broad Foucauldian claims regarding power, what stuck me most here was her subtle and skilful approach to the study of police authority as a constantly shifting game in motion. Her repeated returns to the field, providing examples from her notes of the ways police, from a new recruit posted to a small thana (local station) to senior officers, as well as citizens who alternately cry for police assistance and damn their mendacity, and the politicians who valorize officers' sacrifices while playing them like chess pieces (see pp. …