Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger

by Mirco Göpfert

Overview

In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the other.

Throughout Policing the Frontier, Göpfert contends that bureaucracy and police work emerge in a sphere of constant and ambivalent connection and separation. Göpfert's frontier in Niger (and beyond) is seen through ideas of space, condition, and project, packed with constraints and possibilities, riddled with ambiguities, and brutally destructive yet profoundly empowering. As he demonstrates, the tragedy of the frontier becomes as palpable as the true impossibility of police work and bureaucracy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501747243
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2020
Series:	Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime, and Governance
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mirco Göpfert is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has published numerous articles and is co-editor of Police in Africa. Follow him on X @mirco_goepfert.

Table of Contents

1. A Handful of Gendarmes, Two Worlds, and the Frontier Between
2. A History of the Gendarmerie in Niger
3. A Story of a Murder, No Traces, and Nothing to Report
4. The Ear: Listening to Noise, Hearing Cases
5. The Eye: Surveillance and the Problem of "Seeing Things"
6. The Pen: Report Writing and Bureaucratic Aesthetics
7. Drama Work
8. Repair Work
9. Tragic Work
Postscript: On the Significance of the Frontier

What People are Saying About This

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology Olly Owen

Policing the Frontier is a great ethnography and an important contribution to the anthropology of the state in Africa, showing Nigerien gendarmes as frontiersmen, negotiating a vast space, a variegated society, and a state with limited capacity to enforce domain over it.

Mahaman Tidjani Alou

Policing the Frontier is a highly original study of the construction of the state. It is original in terms of its field site, i.e. the gendarmerie in Niger, a country of the African Sahel, and especially in terms of its focus on the state agents' everyday work of qualifying and interpreting what they meet at their desks and counters. The bureaucrats' work is presented, above all, as a process of the fabrication of bureaucracy in the realm of the everyday. As such, this study rehabilitates empirical research on the state by demonstrating the vast potential hidden in a broad range of fields of inquiry.

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology OllyOwen

"Policing the Frontieris a great ethnography and an important contribution to the anthropology of the state in Africa, showing Nigerien gendarmes as frontiersmen, negotiating a vast space, a variegated society, and a state with limited capacity to enforce domain over it."

Olly Owen

Policing the Frontier is a great ethnography and an important contribution to the anthropology of the state in Africa, showing Nigerien gendarmes as frontiersmen, negotiating a vast space, a variegated society, and a state with limited capacity to enforce domain over it.

Carola Lentz

With its focus on policing as work, this book offers an innovative approach to the study of bureaucracies in Africa—and beyond. Living with Nigerien gendarmes for over a year, the author observed closely how these public servants treaded their way between the life world of the rural population and the bureaucratic order. Written in an engaging prose, Policing the Frontier combines rich ethnographic detail with productive theoretical reflections on the relation between state and civil society, law and social justice, and the enormous challenges of police work.

Editorial Reviews

Göpfert... has produced an insightful work investigating policing in Niger, where the relationship between the state and its citizens is often tenuous.

Choice

Göpfert... has produced an insightful work investigating policing in Niger, where the relationship between the state and its citizens is often tenuous.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher