J Beek
Biographic Data
| ID | 21702 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Beek |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Beek |
| SIGNATURE | BEEK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Goethe University Frankfurt |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7400-0746 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana
In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned th…
Bureaucrats as Para-Ethnologists
Travelling multi‐level marketing schemes and whispers of fraud in Kenya
While the transnational flows of goods, people and ideas have been increasing in the last decades, many people in Africa feel excluded from the possibilities that these connections bring. In Nairobi, some multi‐level marketing schemes are offering everyone the chance to partake in new forms of wealth creation, and hundreds of thousands of Kenyans have joined them. Such schemes have been travelling rapidly worldwide and seem to successfully circul…
Mapping out an anthropology of defrauding and faking
In the aftermath of the global economic crisis and the rise of post‐truth in media and politics, trust and authenticity appear as fleeting qualities, having been replaced by suspicions of fraud and fakery. By looking at defrauding and faking as practices and questioning public discourses about them, laden with normative evaluations, as they are, this special issue ethnographically explores everyday interactions and imaginaries, to learn about the…
Orders of trade
Looking closely at everyday practices within marketplaces such as the Makola market in Ghana's capital Accra brings to the fore the very diversity of actors and institutions involved in order-implementation in this particular social space. All of these actors draw on multiple conceptions of order and creatively recombine its various elements and significations into ever-new contexts. Our joint article on the maintenance of order in Makola takes t…
Cybercrime, Police Work and Storytelling in West Africa
In West Africa, both cyber fraud and cyber policing are mainly about storytelling. Based on fieldwork in the Ghanaian police, this article explores criminal investigations of email scams; it shows how actors rely on, make use of, lose faith in and reinvent stories. Each cyber fraud case can be understood as a series of connected tales, and all involved try to change the direction of the narrative. While the first tale takes place in virtual space…
Travelling police
Police models travel around the globe and many arrive in the shape of police reforms in West Africa. On the ground, these transnational connections are composed of interactions between police officers carrying and receiving such models. Similar to the travel of other models, African officers usually adapt and subvert official reforms. In this article, we argue that the potential for wide-ranging organisational change is caused not so much by thes…
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Police violence in West Africa
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
There should be no open doors in the police
In criminal investigations by police officers in northern Ghana, the lines are fluid: civilians arrest suspects on their own, assuming the tasks of the police. Police officers are heavily influenced by civilians, often forming paid alliances with them. Yet such entanglements paradoxically enable state policing and integrate the police into society in a context of low resources and low legitimacy. Other practices limit and frame such transgression…
Every car has an offence on it
Polizeiliche Verkehrskontrollen in Westafrika sind kurze Interaktionssequenzen, die normalerweise nur in Bezug auf Korruption erwähnt werden. Ihre ethnologische Erforschung kann aber auch kontrapunktisch die Bezugnahme auf öffentliche Ordnung, Gesetze und Sozialität durch die Polizisten untersuchen, also die widersprüchliche Alltagswirklichkeit bürokratischen Handelns. Polizeiliche Praktiken entwickeln sich in Anpassung an interne und externe Bed…
Étiqueter les « déviants
Les policiers du Nord-Ghana définissent la déviance de manière étonnamment imprécise et qualifient en général les habitants de désinformés 1 et de terroristes. La méthode ethnographique révèle le rôle de ces discours en tant que stratégies d’orientation et de légitimation et met en lumière la manière dont les pratiques informelles s’en écartent régulièrement. Ces pratiques policières, qui apparaissent à première vue comme problématiques, peuvent …
Police violence in West Africa
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
There should be no open doors in the police
In criminal investigations by police officers in northern Ghana, the lines are fluid: civilians arrest suspects on their own, assuming the tasks of the police. Police officers are heavily influenced by civilians, often forming paid alliances with them. Yet such entanglements paradoxically enable state policing and integrate the police into society in a context of low resources and low legitimacy. Other practices limit and frame such transgression…
Cybercrime, Police Work and Storytelling in West Africa
In West Africa, both cyber fraud and cyber policing are mainly about storytelling. Based on fieldwork in the Ghanaian police, this article explores criminal investigations of email scams; it shows how actors rely on, make use of, lose faith in and reinvent stories. Each cyber fraud case can be understood as a series of connected tales, and all involved try to change the direction of the narrative. While the first tale takes place in virtual space…
Orders of trade
Looking closely at everyday practices within marketplaces such as the Makola market in Ghana's capital Accra brings to the fore the very diversity of actors and institutions involved in order-implementation in this particular social space. All of these actors draw on multiple conceptions of order and creatively recombine its various elements and significations into ever-new contexts. Our joint article on the maintenance of order in Makola takes t…
Étiqueter les « déviants
Les policiers du Nord-Ghana définissent la déviance de manière étonnamment imprécise et qualifient en général les habitants de désinformés 1 et de terroristes. La méthode ethnographique révèle le rôle de ces discours en tant que stratégies d’orientation et de légitimation et met en lumière la manière dont les pratiques informelles s’en écartent régulièrement. Ces pratiques policières, qui apparaissent à première vue comme problématiques, peuvent …
Every car has an offence on it
Polizeiliche Verkehrskontrollen in Westafrika sind kurze Interaktionssequenzen, die normalerweise nur in Bezug auf Korruption erwähnt werden. Ihre ethnologische Erforschung kann aber auch kontrapunktisch die Bezugnahme auf öffentliche Ordnung, Gesetze und Sozialität durch die Polizisten untersuchen, also die widersprüchliche Alltagswirklichkeit bürokratischen Handelns. Polizeiliche Praktiken entwickeln sich in Anpassung an interne und externe Bed…
Bureaucrats as Para-Ethnologists
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana
In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned th…
Étiqueter les « déviants
Les policiers du Nord-Ghana définissent la déviance de manière étonnamment imprécise et qualifient en général les habitants de désinformés 1 et de terroristes. La méthode ethnographique révèle le rôle de ces discours en tant que stratégies d’orientation et de légitimation et met en lumière la manière dont les pratiques informelles s’en écartent régulièrement. Ces pratiques policières, qui apparaissent à première vue comme problématiques, peuvent …
Every car has an offence on it
Polizeiliche Verkehrskontrollen in Westafrika sind kurze Interaktionssequenzen, die normalerweise nur in Bezug auf Korruption erwähnt werden. Ihre ethnologische Erforschung kann aber auch kontrapunktisch die Bezugnahme auf öffentliche Ordnung, Gesetze und Sozialität durch die Polizisten untersuchen, also die widersprüchliche Alltagswirklichkeit bürokratischen Handelns. Polizeiliche Praktiken entwickeln sich in Anpassung an interne und externe Bed…
There should be no open doors in the police
In criminal investigations by police officers in northern Ghana, the lines are fluid: civilians arrest suspects on their own, assuming the tasks of the police. Police officers are heavily influenced by civilians, often forming paid alliances with them. Yet such entanglements paradoxically enable state policing and integrate the police into society in a context of low resources and low legitimacy. Other practices limit and frame such transgression…
State Violence Specialists in West Africa
Staatliche Gewaltspezialisten in Westafrika Bei der Begegnung mit Uniformierten in Afrika ist es für unerfahrene Beobachter schwer zu sagen, welcher staatlichen Organisation diese angehören und welche Aufgaben sie haben: Soldaten, Gendarmen, Polizisten, Feuerwehrmänner, Zollbeamte, Förster und community policemen sind alle uniformiert und meist mit AK-47 bewaffnet. Ihre Aufgaben sind nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzt und machen oft den Eindruck, …
Police violence in West Africa
This article explores the use of violence by police officers and gendarmes in Ghana and Niger. We analyse how popular discourses, legal and organizational conditions frame the police use of violence. Acts of violence by police are situated in this inconsistent framework and can be seen as legal and appropriate, despicable and brutal, or as useful and morally legitimate. Thus, every time the police use violence, they face a major dilemma: legally …
Travelling police
Police models travel around the globe and many arrive in the shape of police reforms in West Africa. On the ground, these transnational connections are composed of interactions between police officers carrying and receiving such models. Similar to the travel of other models, African officers usually adapt and subvert official reforms. In this article, we argue that the potential for wide-ranging organisational change is caused not so much by thes…
Cybercrime, Police Work and Storytelling in West Africa
In West Africa, both cyber fraud and cyber policing are mainly about storytelling. Based on fieldwork in the Ghanaian police, this article explores criminal investigations of email scams; it shows how actors rely on, make use of, lose faith in and reinvent stories. Each cyber fraud case can be understood as a series of connected tales, and all involved try to change the direction of the narrative. While the first tale takes place in virtual space…
Orders of trade
Looking closely at everyday practices within marketplaces such as the Makola market in Ghana's capital Accra brings to the fore the very diversity of actors and institutions involved in order-implementation in this particular social space. All of these actors draw on multiple conceptions of order and creatively recombine its various elements and significations into ever-new contexts. Our joint article on the maintenance of order in Makola takes t…
Travelling multi‐level marketing schemes and whispers of fraud in Kenya
While the transnational flows of goods, people and ideas have been increasing in the last decades, many people in Africa feel excluded from the possibilities that these connections bring. In Nairobi, some multi‐level marketing schemes are offering everyone the chance to partake in new forms of wealth creation, and hundreds of thousands of Kenyans have joined them. Such schemes have been travelling rapidly worldwide and seem to successfully circul…
Mapping out an anthropology of defrauding and faking
In the aftermath of the global economic crisis and the rise of post‐truth in media and politics, trust and authenticity appear as fleeting qualities, having been replaced by suspicions of fraud and fakery. By looking at defrauding and faking as practices and questioning public discourses about them, laden with normative evaluations, as they are, this special issue ethnographically explores everyday interactions and imaginaries, to learn about the…
Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana
In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned th…
Bureaucrats as Para-Ethnologists
Political science (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (7 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (5 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Political economy (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works)