Community policing in post-war Mozambique

Abstract

Central to the post-conflict democratic transition in Mozambique, there have been attempts to reform the national police in accordance with the rule of law and human rights. From 2000, failures to democratise the police during the 1990s led to the introduction of community policing, which, it was promised, could engender ‘a new culture of security’ of police–community partnerships, citizen inclusion and accountable state policing. This article explores how state-initiated community policing was implemented in a rural former war-zone. Based on ethnographic fieldwork it asks what local versions of community policing means for everyday policing practices and where this is taking police–citizen relations. It shows that community policing was principally used by the local police to expand state police outreach and reassert sovereign authority by outsourcing extra-legal tasks to young men. The result is reconfigured forms of physical and symbolic police violence, which reproduce significant elements of past paramilitary policing cultures.