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"South Africa boasts the largest private security sector in the entire world, reflecting deep anxieties about violence, security, and governance. Twilight Policing is an ethnographic study of the daily policing practices of armed response officers, a specific type of private security officer, and their interactions with citizens and the state police in Durban, South Africa. This book shows how their policing practices simultaneously undermine and support the state, resulting in actions that are neither public nor private, but something in between, something 'twilight.' Their performances of security are also punitive, disciplinary, and exclusionary, and work to reinforce post-apartheid racial and economic inequalities. Ultimately, Twilight Policing helps to illuminate how citizens survive volatile conditions and to whom they assign the authority to guide them in the process"--Provided by publisher

"South Africa boasts the largest private security sector in the entire world, reflecting deep anxieties about violence, security, and governance. Twilight Policing is an ethnographic study of the daily policing practices of armed response officers, a specific type of private security officer, and their interactions with citizens and the state police in Durban, South Africa. This book shows how their policing practices simultaneously undermine and support the state, resulting in actions that are neither public nor private, but something in between, something 'twilight.' Their performances of security are also punitive, disciplinary, and exclusionary, and work to reinforce post-apartheid racial and economic inequalities. Ultimately, Twilight Policing helps to illuminate how citizens survive volatile conditions and to whom they assign the authority to guide them in the process"--Provided by publisher

Security Blurs makes an important contribution to anthropological work on security. It introduces the notion of "security blurs" to analyse manifestations of security that are visible and identifi able, yet constructed and made up of a myriad and overlapping set of actors, roles, motivations, values, practices, ideas, materialities and power dynamics in their inception and performance. The chapters address the entanglements and overlaps between a variety of state and non-state security providers, from the police and the military to vigilantes, community organisations and private security companies. The contributors offer rich ethnographic studies of everyday security practices across a range of cultural contexts and reveal the impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. This book presents a new anthropological approach to security by explicitly addressing the overlap and entanglement of the practices and discourses of state and non-state security providers, and the associated forms of cooperation and confl ict that permit an analysis of these actors' activities as increasingly "blurred".