The past decade has seen the consolidation of a substantial sociological literature exploring how practices, institutions and discourses of policing figure in the politics of neoliberalism. In has become common to speak of a distinctive form of “neoliberal penality”, which in its discursive dimensions involves the demonisation of the poor as a source of criminal disorder, an emphasis on the need for the state to secure society from their depredations, and a corresponding glorification of policing and carceral apparatuses as the means by which this is to be achieved. It has been argued that such aggressive discourses on crime control offer new bases of political legitimacy for states which have abdicated functions like economic regulation and social support. However, this existing literature has focused overwhelmingly on Europe and North America. To the extent that it offers tools for thinking about the relationship between neoliberal restructuring and the politics of crime control in other parts of the world, this has too often boiled down to an unsatisfactory hub-and-spokes diffusion model, whereby “neoliberal penality” is depicted as having been forged in the United States and then exported to its peripheries. As a basis for engaging critically with such accounts, this paper considers decades’ worth of writings by senior officers on matters of crime, security and the economy published in an Egyptian police journal which has been in continuous production since 1958, alongside memoirs and PhD theses by Egyptian policemen. This source material suggests that shifts in the politics of policing which occurred as Egypt transitioned from a broadly socialist orientation into an era of economic liberalisation, privatisation and welfare retrenchment have not been reflective of some universal model of “neoliberal penality”, nor can they be reduced to echoes of developments underway in the US. In fact, the ways in which senior Egyptian policemen sought to publicly frame and position themselves within these far-reaching socioeconomic transformations from the infitah-era onwards were strongly informed by Egypt’s own endogenous history, including its particular location in the global economy, the persistence of forms of security discourse carried over from the Nasser era, and pre-existing configurations of political legitimacy and citizenship. In drawing out the significance of local specificities and contingency, the paper argues for the need to bring historicised perspectives to bear in efforts to understand how policing has figured in the politics of neoliberalism in contexts across the Global South.

Like many of the small Persian Gulf states, the Kingdom of Bahrain possesses an internal security apparatus comprised overwhelmingly of foreign officers. Heralding from various corners of the former British Empire, these recruits are generally described as the politically malleable muscle relied upon by the ruling family to quell internal political threats and sustain autocracy. While the Bahraini government’s current practices of recruiting foreign Sunni officers received increased attention after the country’s 2011 uprising, there has been very little research into the historical origins of this phenomenon. This lacuna in the scholarship has led some scholars to attribute foreign recruitment to the sectarian imperative of supporting Sunni hegemony in a majority Shia state dating back to its years as a British protectorate. Problematically, these analyses not only ignore the non-sectarian motivations behind policing and securitization in Bahrain during the colonial era, but also gloss over the labor struggles, race relations, and cross-sectarian political unrest that lie at the core of the security apparatuses’ early development. By misrepresenting these critical nascent stages, one fails to understand how the Bahraini government’s reliance on foreign recruits initially developed and functioned to preserve the hegemony of the ruling family after Britain’s withdrawal in 1971. This paper fills in these gaps by starting from the premise that pre-independence Bahrain was not presided over by a unified sovereign. Between the interests of British colonial officials, an American oil company, the Al Khalifah ruling family, as well as local political movements and social classes, there were competing interests that played out in overlapping spheres of jurisdiction and in occasionally contradictory ways through the various security forces active on the archipelago. I argue that the imperative of protecting the ruling family’s economic interests as well as those of British and American officials and oilmen provided the initial stimulus for recruiting martially trained officers from Britain’s rapidly decolonizing empire, a practice that was further regularized and institutionalized after independence. Drawing on both British and American archival documents, this paper casts doubt on retrospective analyses that transpose contemporary sectarian sociopolitical dynamics onto an earlier period when such imperatives had little bearing on each sovereign’s security calculations. Closely examining the tandem development of Bahrain’s economy and security apparatuses, this paper sheds new lights on the ways in which Bahrain’s foreign-dominated police forces were not fashioned by, but rather helped shape the conditions of possibility for, state-institutionalized sectarianism in the post-independence era.

This paper examines the emergence of Iranian social scientific and Pahlavi state discourses on the prison in the post World War II era, with a focus on the literature of little-studied state-run institutions such as the Institute for the Cooperation and Industry of Prisoners (ICIP) [Bungāh-i Ta‘āvun va Ṣanā‘ī’-i Zindāniān], as well as early academic texts on criminology. I argue that just as reformists and political adversaries of the Pahlavi state were defining their politics against the prison cell and Pahlavi punishment practices, the state was claiming the prison as a success story in its modernizing efforts. By extolling the social virtues of its penal factories and literacy classes, these state discourses mark the prison-factory as a space of rehabilitation in which the Bad Criminal would be reformed through a productive economy of the body into the Good Citizen. In this paper, I also examine several unpublished Iranian PhD dissertations and early academic texts on criminology and criminal psychology, charting the rise of social scientific debates on the relative merits of certain punishment techniques, and argue that the findings of these new academic disciplines mapped onto the state’s modernizing sentiments regarding productivity, discipline, and citizenship. Influenced by — and often working in concert with — scholars writing in these emergent social scientific and psycho-medical discourses, the Pahlavi state emphasized the need to view the modern “penitentiary” [nedāmatgāh] as a place where criminals were sent “as punishment, not for punishment.” Indeed, by mid-century, state discourses professed a sense of responsibility towards the moral, psychological, and physical cultivation of each prisoner in service of society, building factories, gym facilities, and classrooms in its prisons. According to the increasingly therapeutic logic of these academic and state prison discourses, without these facilities, the “social illness” of crime could never be cured. In uncovering these histories, this paper charts the effects of a Pahlavi state increasingly focused on the cultivation [tarbiyat] of normative citizens through its prison policies.

Khaled Fahmy's classic study of Egyptian police in the third quarter of the nineteenth century shows that the institution of the dabtiyya was closer to the people and more trusted and powerful than the majalis courts. Whereas his study depicts a moment in time, this paper seeks to describe change in the decades that followed. The dabtiyya retained its role as a one-stop site of informal dispute resolution, but the policing institution had matured—soured, even—by the turn of the century. The notorious foreign personnel of the urban police were removed in the 1880s, but even for “natives” a police career meant sustained collaboration with the entrenched British occupation. The structures of police institutions are archivally elusive, both in past and present. This paper uses criminal judicial dossiers to reconstruct the work that took place at police stations in turn-of-the-century Egypt. Its central narrative is drawn from a 1905 corruption case that took place within a district police station in Alexandria. This case shows that the police was a complex institution, certainly of the state, but not a panopticon or even a well-ordered power center. The police station was a microcosm of the city's jurisdictional mixity, but not a site of particular fluidity. By the turn of the century, its bureaucracy was entrenched and routine; the police were an unrivaled source of order, but they were not particularly good at their job. The police were, however, the principal means by which the law of the expanding state was diffused. Since 'Abd al-Wahhab Bakr's classic institutional studies of the police, historians' understanding of that law has developed in depth and breadth. This paper seeks to complement recent efforts to explain the legal pluralism of late British/Ottoman Egyptian lawyers to consider the crucial matter of implementation. As Samera Esmeir has shown, the colonial state depended on bold assertion of sovereignty by judges, officials, and police administrators. The everyday work of the police with the people, where the formal meets the informal, reveals that on the ground, modern law was less doctrinally fascinating—and more procedurally complex—than the current literature has shown.