It was common enough for people to leave their doors open night and day when [Cambara] lived in Mogadiscio and you could take peace for granted. Later, with kickbacks and other forms of corruption creating overnight millionaires, the city became flooded with the unemployed, the poor, and the migrants from the starving hinterland, and fences went up faster than you could tally the changing death and birth statistics. Sometime later, residents upgraded the fences, putting broken glass, razor blades, and electric wire on top to deter robbers. Imagine: an open gate. What can it mean?

[While] much current opinion, stretching from libertarian to Foucauldian, might minimize the importance of the state, there is plentiful evidence in popular fantasy of a nostalgia for authoritative, even authoritarian government … in their imaginaire, a metaphysics of disorder – the hyperreal conviction, rooted in everyday experience, that society hovers on the brink of dissolution – comes to legitimize a physics of social order, to be accomplished through effective law enforcement.

(Jean Comaroff & John L. Comaroff – ‘Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing and the Metaphysics of Disorder’, 2006: 293–294)