CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP
presents:
Beatrice Jauregui
University of Toronto
Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies
Enemy within the state: illicit police unionism and asymmetric lawfare in postcolonial India
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
The rights of public police to unionize diverge significantly across time and space. In parts of postcolonial India, a few police professional associations are officially recognized as legitimate, especially organizations for senior officers understood to be “purely social” (read: “not political”). However, at the federal level, police unions—and by proxy, police unionism, or social movements by officers to form or join labor organizations—have been outlawed since 1966 by an act of parliament. Even so, for decades police unionists have been active across the country, and at the center of both non-violent protests and lethal uprisings related to issues of police welfare and institutional reform. This essay examines how the state in northern India has responded to past and present attempts by police to form legally registered and officially recognized unions, through statutory and executive bans, and also through administrative, judicial, and even militarized repression. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic and archival research, I demonstrate how these government responses to police unionist protest and litigation constitute a form of “asymmetric lawfare” that reflects and reinforces pervasive structures of social inequality that work beyond organizational disciplinary hierarchies. This longue durée analysis of the legal politics of police unionism in a post colony reveals fundamental contradictions in concepts of democratic governance, public welfare, and social justice.
Beatrice Jauregui is Assistant professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of
Toronto. Her research is concerned with how the lived experiences of persons working in police, military and
other social organizations reflect and shape dynamics of authority, security and order. Jauregui’s book Provisional
Authority (University of Chicago 2016) is an ethnography of everyday police practices in northern India.
She is also co-editor of Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (University of Chicago 2010) and The
SAGE Handbook of Global Policing (Sage 2016), as well as author of numerous chapter contributions and
research articles published in American Ethnologist, Asian Policing, Conflict and Society, Journal of South Asian
Studies, Law and Social Inquiry, and Public Culture.
For more workshop information, please contact Events at events.law@utoronto.ca
