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Lawfare and Security Labor: Subjectification and Subjugation of Police Workers in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2021

Beatrice Jauregui
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Abstract

What labor rights do police workers have? How are they legally delimited? This article addresses these questions through a case study of government responses to attempts by police constables in post/colonial South Asia to express job-related grievances and establish employee unions. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents collected in India over fifteen years, the analysis demonstrates that, for more than a century, class warfare within police organizations has manifested in counter-insurgency “lawfare” between senior officials and subordinate personnel regarding whether and how the latter may collectively organize to transform their living and working conditions. It further shows how in this context law as a social field has worked to subjectify rank-and-file police as an ironically exploitable and expendable class of laborers who are always already suspect of rebelling against the state that they have sworn to serve. Through revelations of a long history of structural servitude compelling subaltern police in South Asia to do questionably legal types of labor, this study raises challenging questions about how police work has been conceived and practiced globally as “security labor” and how, moving forward, we must work to reimagine what police work is, what it can be, and what it ought to be.

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Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 420 - 448
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

Research for this article was made possible by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council in the United States, the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom, and a Connaught Award from the University of Toronto. Dr. Ekta Gautam, Ashish Kumar, and Dr. Shahid Perwez provided invaluable research assistance. I dedicate this to Dr. Shahid Perwez, who lost his life to COVID-19 in May 2021 amidst the catastrophic second wave of the pandemic that spread across India. I would like to thank participants in the Critical Analysis of Law workshop, the Write as if it matters online working group, and the Sociolegal studies working group at the University of Toronto for comments on earlier drafts, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments that helped improve the piece. I am responsible for all content herein.

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