Policing Urban Africa

For most citizens in urban Africa, private security companies and civilian self-help or community policing groups today constitute the most significant everyday security providers. This challenges the notion of security as a common good delivered for free by the state police and other public institutions. Security is instead something you pay for, if you can, or try to get by engaging in self-help policing.

In African cities, the privatization of security reinforces urban inequalities and socio-spatial divisions between upper-class citizens and slum-dwellers who are left to fend for themselves. These divisions are deepened by neo-liberal capitalist developments, rising fear of crime and by different forms of state withdrawal from the provision of public goods. However, from an empirical perspective private security and civilian self-help are much less divided than commonly assumed. Increasingly they operate across socio-spatial boundaries, giving way to different forms of entanglements of security logics and practices.

This article published in African Affairs by DIIS senior researcher Helene Maria Kyed and Tessa Diphoorn explores the varied entanglements of private and communal forms of policing in urban areas of South Africa and Swaziland.

Based on long-term ethnographies of everyday security provision it shows how commercial logics of security continuously interact and merge with notions of communal care, popular punishments and collective arrangements. Private security companies and civilian community policing actors collaborate as well as compete in different ways. These entanglements occur beside the state, but have significant implications for how we also understand the development of security provision by the state.

The article argues that, although security is increasingly something you pay for, if you can afford it, there are also strong notions of communal care and ideas about security as a common good at play. This happens in urban contexts where increased spatial divisions, societal tensions, youth marginalization, and economic inequalities, push people into finding alternative ways of protecting themselves.

Photo by Tessa Diphoorn