Policing is not a popular topic of serious scholarly research. Although a vast literature on policing exists, it is mostly technical in nature and only rarely analytical. Even the police forces of Western Europe and North America have rarely been investigated in depth as far as their history and functioning goes. In particular, the politics of policing, its political economy, have been largely neglected.
This book is a rare in-depth study of a police force in a developing country which is also undergoing a bitter internal conflict, further to the post-2001 external intervention in...