Tessa Diphoorn
Biographic Data
| ID | 78716 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tessa Diphoorn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tessa |
| FAMILY NAME | Diphoorn |
| SIGNATURE | DIPHOORN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7357-5954 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
They Speak Our Language
This article introduces a kinship anthropology of policing framework to analyze the complexities and contestedness of police reform trajectories. Kinship is approached in a processual sense, made through practices and performances, and I contend that police officers act as a kin‐like group who engage in kinning. In turn, police reform trajectories and oversight practices are geared towards dekinning and the disruption of kin‐like groups to implem…
Nairobi Becoming
Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twent…
From religious police to religious policing
The everyday political economy of private security
In this article we map out a new research agenda for studying private security. We do so by bringing together a series of theoretical, methodological, and geographical ‘turns’ in this area of research that, in our view, signpost the way towards a deeper understanding of this market. The first turn is theoretical and concerns the shift from neoclassical economic interpretations of the market for security towards more political economic readings th…
Publics of policing
The rise of private security across the globe has sparked concerns that a central public good is being corporatized, and that policing will no longer be guided by the interests of 'the public'. In this article, we argue that state policing has never been in the interests of 'the public'. Instead, like all policing actors, the state police create and serve something more finite: 'a public'. By exploring the 'publics of policing' we gain important …
I can do things that others can't
In this article, we analyse civic policing in post-apartheid South Africa as a form of 'weaponized volunteering'. We use 'weaponized volunteerism' as a conceptual lens to refer to practices that rest on the potentiality and/or willingness to use physical violence or to harness the physical violence of others under the guise of 'volunteer work'. By drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted by both authors in eThekwini, South Africa, we show th…
Corporate sovereignty
The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of 'corporate sovereignty' and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. …
The 'pure apples
This article analyses various police reform initiatives in Kenya as a form of 'moral bordering'. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, I analyse how police officers differentiate themselves from other police officers along (moral) ideas of reform and how this occurs in two divergent, yet interconnected, directions. The first is a process of bordering in: moral bordering occurs internally within the police…
Why Do We Need Your Research
The anthropology of security is slowly developing into a substantial sub-discipline of anthropology, yet there are only a few works that elaborate on how the research on security is conducted, what ethical issues emerge in this process, and how this differs from research on other topics due to the sensitive, political, and highly controversial nature of security itself. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this scholarly debate by providing a r…
Old Boys and Badmen
Racial profiling by the police is a common occurrence in many countries, and the racialized constructions of threats underlying such policing practices can often be traced to histories of colonialism and slavery. This essay seeks to draw attention to the role of private policing in relation to these legacies. Contemporary private security guards often identify suspicious or threatening persons based on racialized discourses similar to those preva…
Arms for mobility’
This paper analyses two policing arrangements between the state police and several private security companies in Nairobi, Kenya. These arrangements entail that police officers team up together with security officers in their company vehicles. As private security officers are unarmed in Kenya by law, there is a direct exchange of ‘arms for mobility’, an emic term that refers to an exchange of firearms for ‘mobility’, i.e. vehicles and other financ…
Security Blurs
Based on fieldwork with the border police unit in Copenhagen Airport, the chapter describes the blurs that arise when, for one, facial recognition technology takes over the work of sorting travelers and, secondly, individual officers decide whom to inspect during random checks on intra-European flights.\n\nIn both cases, the chapter argues, the processes of decision-making and the allocation of responsibilities for border security are blurred and…
Moonlighting
This chapter focuses on police officers’ ‘moonlighting’ in South Africa. Working in security-related fields outside their police job, as bouncers or in private security companies, police officers engage in a space between public and private policing. This chapter shows not only that state and non-state policing practices influence one another, but that each contains an element of the other. Moonlighting is a continuous boundary-crossing between p…
Eyes, Ears, and Wheels
Research on policing in Africa has provided tremendous insight into how non-state actors, such as gangs, vigilantes, private security companies, and community initiatives, increasingly provide security for urban dwellers across the continent. Consequently, the state has been categorized as one order among many whose authority is co-constituted through relations with other actors. Drawing on our ethnographic fieldwork in the past two years, we hig…
Securitizing capital
In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘securitizing capital’ as a new analytical tool to understand the pluralized landscape of security. We define securitizing capital as a process whereby different forms of capital are, consciously and unconsciously, used to acquire legitimacy and power. While other approaches have been developed to understand pluralized security, such as security networks, nodal frameworks and assemblages, we argue that…
Twilight Policing
Many studies have emphasized the pluralization of policing and the interactions between security providers. However, such studies generally employ a top–down and structural approach, emphasizing the organizational ties between policing bodies. This article employs an ethnographic approach to security and focuses on localized policing performances that materialize from the interactions between security providers. Based on 20 months of ethnographic…
Entanglements of private security and community policing in South Africa and Swaziland
Security in Africa is seldom a public good provided by the state, but is frequently something you pay for or acquire by turning to various non-state or community actors. The privatization of security in African cities is reflected in the rapid growth of the private security industry, which is matched by the widespread involvement of civilian actors in neighbourhood watches and self-organized policing groups. Much of the scholarly debate on ‘plura…
Surveillance of the Surveillers
The growth of the private security industry on the African continent has resulted in an expanding labor force engaged in surveillance-type activities. This article analyzes various levels of regulation of private security officers as a form of surveillance. Based on qualitative methodology, it compares the numerous regulatory efforts implemented by the state, industry, and companies of the private security industry in Kenya and South Africa and s…
It’s All About the Body
In this article, I analyze the role of bodily capital in the daily policing practices of armed response officers, a specific type of private security officers, in Durban, South Africa. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the masculinized bodily capital of armed response officers is a key source of their sovereign power; it plays a central role in how they acquire and exert authority. Furthermore, I argue that an analysis of…
The 'Bravo Mike Syndrome
This article analyses how issues of race influence the occupational culture of the armed response sector, a particular part of the private security industry, in Durban, South Africa. In addition to analysing the racial hierarchy of the industry, this article examines the 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' - Bravo Mike meaning black male in NATO phonetic alphabet code. The 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' refers to the racialised imaginaries of criminals and the subseque…
Typologies of partnership policing
In the contemporary pluralised landscape of policing, partnerships between public and private policing bodies are often the norm, rather than the exception. This is particularly the case for South Africa, where partnering between the state police and private security industry has a long history. Through focusing on different types of partnerships between the state police and the private security industry in urban South Africa, this article shows …
The Emotionality of Participation
This article explores methodological issues as a prominent subject in ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a specific group of private security officers, namely, armed response officers, in Durban, South Africa. Through analyzing several experiences from the field, this article highlights the dialectic between emotions and participation in the field and its imperative role in analysis of the research setting. This article explores three different …
The Emotionality of Participation
This article explores methodological issues as a prominent subject in ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a specific group of private security officers, namely, armed response officers, in Durban, South Africa. Through analyzing several experiences from the field, this article highlights the dialectic between emotions and participation in the field and its imperative role in analysis of the research setting. This article explores three different …
The 'Bravo Mike Syndrome
This article analyses how issues of race influence the occupational culture of the armed response sector, a particular part of the private security industry, in Durban, South Africa. In addition to analysing the racial hierarchy of the industry, this article examines the 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' - Bravo Mike meaning black male in NATO phonetic alphabet code. The 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' refers to the racialised imaginaries of criminals and the subseque…
Surveillance of the Surveillers
The growth of the private security industry on the African continent has resulted in an expanding labor force engaged in surveillance-type activities. This article analyzes various levels of regulation of private security officers as a form of surveillance. Based on qualitative methodology, it compares the numerous regulatory efforts implemented by the state, industry, and companies of the private security industry in Kenya and South Africa and s…
Securitizing capital
In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘securitizing capital’ as a new analytical tool to understand the pluralized landscape of security. We define securitizing capital as a process whereby different forms of capital are, consciously and unconsciously, used to acquire legitimacy and power. While other approaches have been developed to understand pluralized security, such as security networks, nodal frameworks and assemblages, we argue that…
Arms for mobility’
This paper analyses two policing arrangements between the state police and several private security companies in Nairobi, Kenya. These arrangements entail that police officers team up together with security officers in their company vehicles. As private security officers are unarmed in Kenya by law, there is a direct exchange of ‘arms for mobility’, an emic term that refers to an exchange of firearms for ‘mobility’, i.e. vehicles and other financ…
Typologies of partnership policing
In the contemporary pluralised landscape of policing, partnerships between public and private policing bodies are often the norm, rather than the exception. This is particularly the case for South Africa, where partnering between the state police and private security industry has a long history. Through focusing on different types of partnerships between the state police and the private security industry in urban South Africa, this article shows …
Eyes, Ears, and Wheels
Research on policing in Africa has provided tremendous insight into how non-state actors, such as gangs, vigilantes, private security companies, and community initiatives, increasingly provide security for urban dwellers across the continent. Consequently, the state has been categorized as one order among many whose authority is co-constituted through relations with other actors. Drawing on our ethnographic fieldwork in the past two years, we hig…
Twilight Policing
Many studies have emphasized the pluralization of policing and the interactions between security providers. However, such studies generally employ a top–down and structural approach, emphasizing the organizational ties between policing bodies. This article employs an ethnographic approach to security and focuses on localized policing performances that materialize from the interactions between security providers. Based on 20 months of ethnographic…
It’s All About the Body
In this article, I analyze the role of bodily capital in the daily policing practices of armed response officers, a specific type of private security officers, in Durban, South Africa. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the masculinized bodily capital of armed response officers is a key source of their sovereign power; it plays a central role in how they acquire and exert authority. Furthermore, I argue that an analysis of…
Corporate sovereignty
The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of 'corporate sovereignty' and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. …
The 'pure apples
This article analyses various police reform initiatives in Kenya as a form of 'moral bordering'. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, I analyse how police officers differentiate themselves from other police officers along (moral) ideas of reform and how this occurs in two divergent, yet interconnected, directions. The first is a process of bordering in: moral bordering occurs internally within the police…
Entanglements of private security and community policing in South Africa and Swaziland
Security in Africa is seldom a public good provided by the state, but is frequently something you pay for or acquire by turning to various non-state or community actors. The privatization of security in African cities is reflected in the rapid growth of the private security industry, which is matched by the widespread involvement of civilian actors in neighbourhood watches and self-organized policing groups. Much of the scholarly debate on ‘plura…
Publics of policing
The rise of private security across the globe has sparked concerns that a central public good is being corporatized, and that policing will no longer be guided by the interests of 'the public'. In this article, we argue that state policing has never been in the interests of 'the public'. Instead, like all policing actors, the state police create and serve something more finite: 'a public'. By exploring the 'publics of policing' we gain important …
Typologies of partnership policing
In the contemporary pluralised landscape of policing, partnerships between public and private policing bodies are often the norm, rather than the exception. This is particularly the case for South Africa, where partnering between the state police and private security industry has a long history. Through focusing on different types of partnerships between the state police and the private security industry in urban South Africa, this article shows …
The Emotionality of Participation
This article explores methodological issues as a prominent subject in ethnographic fieldwork conducted on a specific group of private security officers, namely, armed response officers, in Durban, South Africa. Through analyzing several experiences from the field, this article highlights the dialectic between emotions and participation in the field and its imperative role in analysis of the research setting. This article explores three different …
It’s All About the Body
In this article, I analyze the role of bodily capital in the daily policing practices of armed response officers, a specific type of private security officers, in Durban, South Africa. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the masculinized bodily capital of armed response officers is a key source of their sovereign power; it plays a central role in how they acquire and exert authority. Furthermore, I argue that an analysis of…
The 'Bravo Mike Syndrome
This article analyses how issues of race influence the occupational culture of the armed response sector, a particular part of the private security industry, in Durban, South Africa. In addition to analysing the racial hierarchy of the industry, this article examines the 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' - Bravo Mike meaning black male in NATO phonetic alphabet code. The 'Bravo Mike Syndrome' refers to the racialised imaginaries of criminals and the subseque…
Securitizing capital
In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘securitizing capital’ as a new analytical tool to understand the pluralized landscape of security. We define securitizing capital as a process whereby different forms of capital are, consciously and unconsciously, used to acquire legitimacy and power. While other approaches have been developed to understand pluralized security, such as security networks, nodal frameworks and assemblages, we argue that…
Twilight Policing
Many studies have emphasized the pluralization of policing and the interactions between security providers. However, such studies generally employ a top–down and structural approach, emphasizing the organizational ties between policing bodies. This article employs an ethnographic approach to security and focuses on localized policing performances that materialize from the interactions between security providers. Based on 20 months of ethnographic…
Entanglements of private security and community policing in South Africa and Swaziland
Security in Africa is seldom a public good provided by the state, but is frequently something you pay for or acquire by turning to various non-state or community actors. The privatization of security in African cities is reflected in the rapid growth of the private security industry, which is matched by the widespread involvement of civilian actors in neighbourhood watches and self-organized policing groups. Much of the scholarly debate on ‘plura…
Surveillance of the Surveillers
The growth of the private security industry on the African continent has resulted in an expanding labor force engaged in surveillance-type activities. This article analyzes various levels of regulation of private security officers as a form of surveillance. Based on qualitative methodology, it compares the numerous regulatory efforts implemented by the state, industry, and companies of the private security industry in Kenya and South Africa and s…
Moonlighting
This chapter focuses on police officers’ ‘moonlighting’ in South Africa. Working in security-related fields outside their police job, as bouncers or in private security companies, police officers engage in a space between public and private policing. This chapter shows not only that state and non-state policing practices influence one another, but that each contains an element of the other. Moonlighting is a continuous boundary-crossing between p…
Eyes, Ears, and Wheels
Research on policing in Africa has provided tremendous insight into how non-state actors, such as gangs, vigilantes, private security companies, and community initiatives, increasingly provide security for urban dwellers across the continent. Consequently, the state has been categorized as one order among many whose authority is co-constituted through relations with other actors. Drawing on our ethnographic fieldwork in the past two years, we hig…
Security Blurs
Based on fieldwork with the border police unit in Copenhagen Airport, the chapter describes the blurs that arise when, for one, facial recognition technology takes over the work of sorting travelers and, secondly, individual officers decide whom to inspect during random checks on intra-European flights.\n\nIn both cases, the chapter argues, the processes of decision-making and the allocation of responsibilities for border security are blurred and…
Old Boys and Badmen
Racial profiling by the police is a common occurrence in many countries, and the racialized constructions of threats underlying such policing practices can often be traced to histories of colonialism and slavery. This essay seeks to draw attention to the role of private policing in relation to these legacies. Contemporary private security guards often identify suspicious or threatening persons based on racialized discourses similar to those preva…
Arms for mobility’
This paper analyses two policing arrangements between the state police and several private security companies in Nairobi, Kenya. These arrangements entail that police officers team up together with security officers in their company vehicles. As private security officers are unarmed in Kenya by law, there is a direct exchange of ‘arms for mobility’, an emic term that refers to an exchange of firearms for ‘mobility’, i.e. vehicles and other financ…
The 'pure apples
This article analyses various police reform initiatives in Kenya as a form of 'moral bordering'. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, I analyse how police officers differentiate themselves from other police officers along (moral) ideas of reform and how this occurs in two divergent, yet interconnected, directions. The first is a process of bordering in: moral bordering occurs internally within the police…
Why Do We Need Your Research
The anthropology of security is slowly developing into a substantial sub-discipline of anthropology, yet there are only a few works that elaborate on how the research on security is conducted, what ethical issues emerge in this process, and how this differs from research on other topics due to the sensitive, political, and highly controversial nature of security itself. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this scholarly debate by providing a r…
Corporate sovereignty
The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of 'corporate sovereignty' and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. …
From religious police to religious policing
The everyday political economy of private security
In this article we map out a new research agenda for studying private security. We do so by bringing together a series of theoretical, methodological, and geographical ‘turns’ in this area of research that, in our view, signpost the way towards a deeper understanding of this market. The first turn is theoretical and concerns the shift from neoclassical economic interpretations of the market for security towards more political economic readings th…
Publics of policing
The rise of private security across the globe has sparked concerns that a central public good is being corporatized, and that policing will no longer be guided by the interests of 'the public'. In this article, we argue that state policing has never been in the interests of 'the public'. Instead, like all policing actors, the state police create and serve something more finite: 'a public'. By exploring the 'publics of policing' we gain important …
I can do things that others can't
In this article, we analyse civic policing in post-apartheid South Africa as a form of 'weaponized volunteering'. We use 'weaponized volunteerism' as a conceptual lens to refer to practices that rest on the potentiality and/or willingness to use physical violence or to harness the physical violence of others under the guise of 'volunteer work'. By drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted by both authors in eThekwini, South Africa, we show th…
Nairobi Becoming
Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twent…
They Speak Our Language
This article introduces a kinship anthropology of policing framework to analyze the complexities and contestedness of police reform trajectories. Kinship is approached in a processual sense, made through practices and performances, and I contend that police officers act as a kin‐like group who engage in kinning. In turn, police reform trajectories and oversight practices are geared towards dekinning and the disruption of kin‐like groups to implem…
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (10 works) · Sex work and related issues (10 works) · Criminology (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · Ethnography (8 works)