Racial Profiling as a Form of Surveillance and Securitizing Practice

Abstract

Racial profiling research is a relatively new, dynamically developing field of knowledge, attracting the growing attention of the scientific community. However, the development of this area is associated with a number of theoretical and methodological problems. In addition to the difficulty of reliably establishing the racial imbalance itself in the law enforcement system using the currently existing methodological approaches, there is the problem of insufficient theoretical understanding of the phenomenon. Criminal justice studies, which traditionally include the study of racial profiling, are not very rich in theoretical approaches. As a rule, they focus on the discrepancy between legally established norms and real practices, and are more descriptive than analytical. In addition, focusing exclusively on the work of the police unnecessarily narrows the research field, leaving behind the scenes actors who are actively involved in the initiation and implementation of racial profiling, but are not directly related to the security field. This article attempts to place the issue of racial profiling within the broader context of the study of surveillance and securitization, using a case study of special controls on people from the Caucasus, Central Asia, Ukraine, and Roma in Russia.