TY - JOUR
T1 - A fighting fetish
T2 - On transnational police and their warlike presentation of self
AU - Sausdal, David
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Transnational police readily use martial language in the stories they tell about their work. Their actual work, however, tells a different and less dramatic story. Why, then, do they insist on these warlike tales? Why is there a discrepancy between the self-representation of transnational policing and its reality? Using an ethnographic study, this article provides some answers. First, it includes an overview of three established explanations of the inclination of transnational police to represent their work in warlike terms. Next, an additional reading is presented. Building on Reiner’s discussion of “police fetishism”, this reading proposes that transnational policing actors have an idée fixe about their own professional inevitability. They blindly believe that policing must exist, but also that it has to be done combatively to truly work. In conclusion, the article contemplates what the existence of such a “fighting fetish” means in both theoretical and reform terms.
AB - Transnational police readily use martial language in the stories they tell about their work. Their actual work, however, tells a different and less dramatic story. Why, then, do they insist on these warlike tales? Why is there a discrepancy between the self-representation of transnational policing and its reality? Using an ethnographic study, this article provides some answers. First, it includes an overview of three established explanations of the inclination of transnational police to represent their work in warlike terms. Next, an additional reading is presented. Building on Reiner’s discussion of “police fetishism”, this reading proposes that transnational policing actors have an idée fixe about their own professional inevitability. They blindly believe that policing must exist, but also that it has to be done combatively to truly work. In conclusion, the article contemplates what the existence of such a “fighting fetish” means in both theoretical and reform terms.
KW - Faculty of Social Sciences
KW - police cultur
KW - police fetishism
KW - presentation of self
KW - transnational ethnography
KW - transnational policing
KW - warfare
U2 - 10.1177/13624806211009487
DO - 10.1177/13624806211009487
M3 - Journal article
VL - 25
SP - 400
EP - 418
JO - Theoretical Criminology
JF - Theoretical Criminology
SN - 1362-4806
IS - 3
ER -