Street authorities and policing in urban Africa

Increased urbanization in Africa and elsewhere is creating new growth opportunities, but has also led to new forms of inequality, political exclusion and insecurity. In fact, most urban residents in southern Africa now live in slums or so-called ‘marginal neighborhoods’ where unemployment, livelihood uncertainties and crime rates are very high and where the possibility for political voice through official channels is low. Here there is a sense that the official state institutions, like the police, are both incapable and unwilling to protect the urban poor citizens. Instead, several alternative non-state or civilian policing actors often evolve to deal with rising crime. In this new article titled ‘Street Authorities: Community Policing in Mozambique and Swaziland’, DIIS senior researcher Helene Maria Kyed explores two such groups of civilian policing actors in two marginal neighborhoods of Mozambique and Swaziland.

Kyed asks what political consequences it has when young civilian men take upon themselves the tasks of patrolling the streets and punishing criminals. She shows that the young men do not only constitute an alternative authority to the state police, but also become politically significant to neighborhood leaders, administrators, and politicians who use them to advance their own political agendas. However, while the community policing members are subject to the political strategies and power contestations of others, they also enact a distinct style of politics and form of authority. Kyed introduces the concept of ‘street authority’ to describe this distinct form of authority, which differs both from the authority of the state police and from the authority of local, traditional leaders. Street authority is characterized by the capacity for swift, direct actions, often through violent means, to order the streets and to produce immediate, and tangible justice to the neighborhood residents. Simultaneously, street authority conveys momentariness and uncertainty, which prevent the formation of stable political organizations that can thoroughly challenge the existing political systems. Such politics emerge in urban contexts where poor urban citizens mistrust the state and where there is a preference for immediate outcomes, because livelihood uncertainties are high.

In the article, Kyed adds a more political anthropological perspective to the burgeoning literature on plural policing and citizen-led security by drawing on ethnography and by exploring the intertwinement of politics and policing.