Shadrack, Jaba Tumaini (2020) Privatised policing duties in a constitutional state: the case of postcolonial Tanzania in socio-legal context. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

In 2006, the government's decision to formally embrace 'polisi jamii' or 'ulinzi shirikishi' (community or participatory police/policing) reinvigorated a fresh urge among scholars to study plural policing in Tanzania. As such, recent literature has paid remarkable attention to the state police, commercial security firms, community-led security groups and party militias in Tanzania. Other scholars have covered some grounds on the role of, and interactions between state and non-state actors under the community policing schemes and the assemblage of security groups in extraction sites. The literature on plural law enforcement in Sub-Saharan Africa has also grown exponentially, but rarely examines counterfactual cases and semi-autocratic states such as Tanzania. This thesis advances our understanding of plural policing in a postcolonial state context where statutory and constitutional bans on private security service providers formalised the notion that the state has a monopoly on the use of force. This thesis locates the bans in a broader context of plural policing and asks, why has the Tanzania state not sought to eliminate non-state policing when it is banned legally and constitutionally? This question allows the study to examine the mechanisms used by successive semi-autocratic governments in Tanzania to manipulate the security sector through the selective use of the legal and constitutional provisions. It concludes that security actors are as much political actors as the act of policing is concerned.

This work, the first of its kind in Tanzania’s settings, builds on and departs from well-known frameworks that view the act of policing in Africa as plural, multichoice, anchored, networked/nodal, assemblage, hybrid, multilateral, fragmented, and order-making. It advocates for a new paradigm, namely ‘state-controlled’ plural policing to develop an overarching theme of the thesis, that is, politics shape, construct, manipulate, and determine the policing scene in Tanzania. Simply put, plural policing of Tanzania has been regulated by successive governments along political interests. The government has had absolute control over the distribution but not the production of security services and that non-state actors are indirect and effective means of state control of violence. Today, the government of Tanzania generates, controls and is part of the commercial security sector and is imbedded in community-based security groups in a domestic space. As such, the ban on private security service providers was not a turning point in real security policies rather it has allowed the government to tighten the control on coercive powers and organise security along the state political ideology. The government has been pragmatic in implementing the bans by constantly manipulating the Constitution and co-opt non-state actors into public policing. The presence of privately and communally organised security groups operating in the country within a plural security landscape proves that the bans have had little weight in practice.

The contributions of this thesis to plural policing literature is manifold. Through a multifaced ‘state-controlled’ plural policing, I problematise and capture state-run commercial security companies and services in the definition of ‘private policing’; I lift a ‘vigilante’ tag on quasi-police groups like sungusungu; I show community policing as a policy that creates the nexus between public and private sectors, community and commercial, and global and local efforts; I point out and explain a complex set of laws and policies that embrace both state-centric and liberal approaches to policing (i.e. the entanglements of new and old laws and policies); I demonstrate the centrality of a semi-autocratic form of government, local politics, and geopolitics (not necessarily law) in organising security; and I explore the exact contours and intricate web of security actors from the precolonial to postcolonial periods. In reaching at the study’s conclusions, I use a ‘decolonising methodology’ and drew on archival research in Dodoma and Dar es Salaam to understand the debates around the 1977 ban and about hybrid policing in the country. I also surveyed comparative examples of ‘hybridity’ and ‘plurality’ in other parts of the country scattered in several historical, political and policing literature. This style of inquiry that incorporates legal dimensions in the analysis is not common in policing literature, and when used, studies tend to mention legal issues in the margins of their findings. Also, I have not married a particular normative stance in favour or against public or private security providers in exploring the ban and the ensuing hybrid forms of security arrangements.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare K Law [Moys] > KR Africa
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Police, Private -- Tanzania, Community policing -- Tanzania, Police -- Tanzania, Postcolonialism -- Tanzania, Public policy (Law) -- Tanzania
Official Date:	October 2020
Dates:	Date Event October 2020 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	School of Law
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Aliverti, Ana J. ; Kuo, Ming-Sung
Sponsors:	Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the United Kingdom
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	xix, 215 leaves
Language:	eng

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