Human Rights and Policing: Exigency or Incongruence?

The juncture of human rights and policing is a relatively recent field of scholarship. It tends to explain the relationship between policing and human rights as one of exigency and necessity, culminating in the idea of police as human rights defenders. An ethnographically rich scholarship on policing has emerged both as a critical response to these assumptions and out of an awareness of the impossible but nevertheless central role that policing has come to play in a neoliberal age. This critical scholarship takes the juncture of policing and human rights as a historically specific phenomenon and enables us to understand many of its contingencies. It reintegrates the normative presuppositions of human rights policing as societal facts among other societal facts and points to how human rights and policing enable and foreclose new ways of ordering society and bring about particular articulations of biopolitics with assertions of sovereignty.