State policing in Mozambique is shaped by contested sovereignty

The new book 'Security Blurs – the Politics of Plural Security Provision', published by Routledge , presents a new anthropological approach to security by explicitly discussing the overlap and entanglement of state and non-state security providers, from the police and the military to vigilantes, community organisations and private security companies.The security blurs that come into being are discursive and practical, and tend to be deeply political, as the state/non-state boundary is negotiated, crossed and defended according to the interests of the actors involved. Case studies include Haiti, Israel, Indonesia, India, Mozambique, Bolivia and Denmark.

DIIS senior researcher Helene Maria Kyed has a chapter in the book on policing in a poor and crime-ridden neighborhood of Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city. She explores the contested entanglement of state police officers with civilian community policing actors.

The security practices of these two sets of actors are continuously blurred, as the civilian actors perform state police duties and the state police engage with popular justice mechanisms, and frequently act informally. Simultaneously, the state police are pre-occupied with efforts to maintain a boundary around their distinct state authority and this leads to frequent competition with their civilian counterparts. The ongoing oscillation between competition and collaboration, Kyed argues, is due to the deeply uncertain and disputed claim to state sovereignty, which has historical roots and is reinforced by the contemporary urban condition.