Boundary Work: Police in West Africa

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Carola Lentz
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 190231091

In the extension period, the project will study processes of transnational transfer of police models to West Africa as well as their local appropriation. The structural conditions and patterns of police work - and more generally state institutions in West Africa - are not only shaped by colonial legacies, but also affected by current transnational ties between police organisations. European, US American and Chinese liaison officers, together with UN instructors, conduct police training, organise police operations and deliver equipment, and thus divulge certain practices and socio-professional norms of policing, or, in other words, transfer different and partially contradictory police models. West African police officers, however, do not simply copy these foreign police models, but select specific elements, combine them with fragments of existing police models and adapt them to local conditions. These processes of transfer and appropriation constitute the backdrop of the different forms of the police officers' boundary work which the project has studied in the first research period. The project's comparative approach, with research in Ghana and Niger, allows to analyse the specificity of these transfer processes in both countries, in West Africa and beyond. Finally, West African police work also produces innovations that may generate transfer processes in the reverse direction.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants