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‘There should be no open doors in the police’: criminal investigations in northern Ghana as boundary work*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2012

Jan Beek
Jan Beek*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 55099 Mainz, Germany
*
Email: beek@uni-mainz.de
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Abstract

In criminal investigations by police officers in northern Ghana, the lines are fluid: civilians arrest suspects on their own, assuming the tasks of the police. Police officers are heavily influenced by civilians, often forming paid alliances with them. Yet such entanglements paradoxically enable state policing and integrate the police into society in a context of low resources and low legitimacy. Other practices limit and frame such transgressions. Using the concept of boundary work, this article analyses how actors maintain and negotiate the seemingly blurred distinction between state and society in West Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 551 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Carola Lentz, Thomas Bierschenk, Mirco Göpfert and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of the paper. The fieldwork it is based on was made possible by the financial support of the German Research Foundation, the German National Academic Foundation, the Sulzmann Foundation, and the Volkswagen Foundation.

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