(In)security in subordination: Policing and policework in postcolonial Pakistan

Abstract

How do elite interests intersect with inequality in postcolonial state institutions and shape the consumption and provision of public services such as policing and security? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, this article explores how subordinate officers experience insecurity within postcolonial policing structures owing to class-based hierarchical divisions, and analyses how these conditions shape their experiences, relationships and performances. I argue that structural inequalities within public institutions, influenced by private interests of external actors, compel subordinates to strategically operationalize informality in policework, deploying it in the service of influential actors and institutions. Furthermore, these subordinates rely upon informal networks and practices to appear indispensable and subvert the hierarchy, securing greater personal and professional gains and steering past class-based constraints. This ‘strategic informality’ enables the rank and file to relationally and procedurally navigate otherwise rigid hierarchical institutional structures that suppress them. In exploring how insecurity and inequality, within and beyond policing institutions, in the context of blurred public–private security divides, necessitates reliance upon informality, and what impacts this has, this article makes a critical contribution to scholarship on security provision in postcolonial contexts.

Introduction

In the 1990s, Karachi – Pakistan’s largest city and financial capital – was engulfed in violent state-sanctioned operations against an ethno-political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). Led by police and paramilitary forces, the operations targeted party workers, with violence raging on both sides. ¹ A lower-ranked police officer, Salman, ² was one of several state agents manifesting a zero-tolerance approach towards the MQM at the behest of its civil and military opponents who sought to break the MQM’s street power. A federal minister had advised these forces ‘to fight terror with terror’ because the ‘city was at war’ ³ and the operations were essential for maintaining national security. As the operations subsided, and the MQM returned to power, its workers retaliated against the police. According to Salman, a so-called Butcher’s List naming policemen who had extrajudicially killed and tortured MQM workers was circulated within the MQM. Subsequently, several of Salman’s colleagues were gunned down in spectacular displays of violence (Khan, 2007).

Worried, Salman approached the architects of the operations against the MQM – Pakistan’s premier intelligence services and the military, which were (and remain) prominent stakeholders in the country’s domestic political and security landscapes. Officer Salman was posted outside Karachi and remained temporarily ‘off the radar’ (Interview 21). Quietly, backdoor negotiations were conducted between Salman, his patrons and senior members of the MQM, and Salman was eventually posted back. These ‘off-the-record’ negotiations accorded Salman the patronage and protection that select police officers receive.

Twenty years later, when I met him, Salman was among the few surviving policemen who had operated against the MQM in the 1990s. Although he continued to serve his patrons, receiving financial rewards and lucrative postings, Salman remained at the junior rank of police inspector, now commanded by an elite cadre of officers with lesser experience and weaker know-how of the city’s violent landscape. Salman’s career spanned his own arrest (and eventual release) for extrajudicially killing an innocent civilian and an armed attack that left him wounded. Although constantly faced with professional and personal insecurities, Salman persisted within the institution of the police because of the strategic allegiances he had formed with external actors who have had political and economic interests in Karachi, and who have relied upon police officers like Salman for securing these interests (including Pakistan’s army and intelligence services). Such interest-protection made officers like Salman (frequently coming from non-elite socio-economic backgrounds) indispensable for a type of ‘security work’ demanded by the elite, for which both sides in these relational exchanges relied upon operationalizing informality in routine police work.

Salman’s case demonstrates the importance of the security work undertaken by public security officers to protect (often mutually inclusive) public and private interests. Thus, we must revisit how public agents and institutions complicate security labour provision, especially in jurisdictions where governing elites privately consume public services. Additionally, recognizing and problematizing colonial continuities and constitutions within both public and private policing and security sectors is now integral to contemporary perspectives on policing (Jaffe and Diphoorn, 2019). Accordingly, we must investigate how the services provided by postcolonial policing institutions secure both public and private interests, and study the institutional and structural conditions that enable this. Salman was a lower-ranked security worker, participating in concerted efforts to protect the interests of Pakistan’s powerful ‘security establishment’, and he operationalized informality in delivering security work to his patrons, who not only tolerated but encouraged this, thus routinizing extrajudicial violence, including what is known in South Asia as the phenomenon of ‘encounter killings’ (Belur, 2010; Jauregui, 2016). The causes and impacts of the strategic use of informality in the service of postcolonial regimes set the foundation for this article.

Accordingly, I ask, how do class-based hierarchies and inequalities historically institutionalized within postcolonial policing mechanisms shape the choices, relationships and performances of subordinate officers? Furthermore, how do these dynamics interplay with the consumption of and demand for policing and security provision beyond the institution? I argue that structural dynamics within postcolonial policing and security institutions, impacted by the private interests of external actors and elite exploitation of security workers, create the conditions necessary for officers to operate outside their formally defined roles, relying instead upon informality in strategic ways. In so doing, I present new perspectives on the security work performed by insecure state agents in postcolonial contexts such as Pakistan.

I develop the concept of ‘strategic informality’, a needs-based strategy that operationalizes ‘informal institutions’ (Helmke and Levitsky, 2004), including a range of ‘off-the-book’ practices and networks, to satisfy clients looking to protect their regime- and elite-centric security demands, while simultaneously striving to protect and advance one’s own personal and professional trajectories. These dynamics are particularly observable in postcolonial contexts, such as Pakistan, where, historically, police hyper-empowerment (with an emphasis on the use of excessive force to fulfil overtly political functions of the police; see Jaffe and Diphoorn, 2019) has occurred in conjunction with officers’ ‘disempowerment’ due to insecure regimes and local strongmen who ‘have interests other than the “public good” in mind’ (Jauregui, 2013: 661).

Confronted with such an empowerment–disempowerment paradox, officers navigate the limitations placed upon them and manifest informality as a survival strategy. ‘Strategic informality’, or the strategic operationalization of informal processes, procedures, behaviours and contacts, is enabled both by the regime- and elite-centric security demands placed on the police through their social and patronage networks and by the facilitating factors specific to the institution of the postcolonial police itself that exacerbate workers’ insecurities.

Pakistan offers a unique space for critically exploring these dynamics. A former British colony, Pakistan inherited colonial policing organizations that institutionalized a classist structure wherein officers from privileged backgrounds (primarily white and British) commanded a workforce of predominantly ‘native’ junior officers tasked with maintaining order and protecting colonial interests. This unequal structural divide enabled institutional abuse (see Arnold, 1976; Baxi, 1982; Heath, 2021). In postcolonial Pakistan, this structure has been retained by successive governments, including political parties and the military elite, in their long-running competition over political and economic resources in urban centres such as Karachi, frequently with the support of the business and industrial elite. These dynamics have sabotaged efforts towards reforming this colonial policing design and further cemented class-based and racialized inequalities within the police, sustaining regimented hierarchies and marginalizing junior officers at the institution’s lowest tiers (the ‘subordinates’) while ensuring their ability to mete out excessive violence (Waseem, 2022a). Thus the police remain deployed as a security technology for the state, ‘intermediaries’ between state and society, ‘violence workers’ and ‘security tools’ (Arnold, 1976; Campion, 2003; Heath, 2021; Owen, 2016b). Faced with such institutional discrimination and security-specific role definitions, police subordinates address their own vulnerabilities by informally forging alliances and partnerships with multiple, and often competing, individual and institutional patrons, including elites within state institutions (such as political parties or military organizations) and influential elites outside the formal state with access to law enforcement agencies (such as businessmen and industrialists). Pakistan has long witnessed its elites disproportionately access policing and other security providers, among other public services – especially in the aftermath of the ‘war on terror’ (Jackson et al., 2014). These patron–client alliances provide space for relational exchanges grounded in officers’ abilities to act in ways that go beyond their legal and discretionary powers. As argued here, in a postcolonial context such as that of Pakistan, public policing actors maintain intimate relations with private actors. The provision of public security thus remains skewed towards preserving a social structure in which the elite are avid consumers of the commodity of policing.

This article focuses on Karachi, an institutionally complex city with multiple security stakeholders (civil, military and private) at times in partnership, but frequently competing (Waseem, 2021). Karachi has seen decades of violent politicking even before the onset of the ‘war on terror’ enlarged Pakistan’s security market with ever-multiplying security consumers. It has also seen the militarization of securitized spaces due to persisting urban insecurity (see also Kaker, 2014) and the ‘corporate mobilization for security’ as private entrepreneurs vie for greater access to security ‘goods’ (Gayer and Russo, 2022). The city is policed by Karachi Police, under the command of Sindh Police. The police are hierarchically divided into two separate cadres of officers: the gazetted cadre of federally appointed elite officers belonging to the Police Services of Pakistan (PSP, a component of the civil services), which preside over the non-gazetted cadre – that is, the provincially recruited rank and file. This creates distinct pathways for entering and progressing within the institution. This design facilitates classism within Pakistan’s police that is historically entrenched and calculatedly preserved – an inheritance of a colonial institutional architecture uncritically adopted and fermented by Pakistan’s postcolonial regimes (Waseem, 2022a).

In this article, I assess how individual and professional insecurity on the part of junior officers (primarily the rank and file) influences their relational alignment, career navigation and, by extension, performance, especially in Karachi’s highly securitized urban environment. I explore how colonial continuities ensure ready supplies of security workers willing to form alliances and strategically mobilize informality for opportunities within an otherwise restrictive and regimented hierarchy. I draw upon fieldwork conducted in Karachi through multiple visits between 2015 and 2021, selecting 29 in-depth interviews with senior and junior police officers. Of these, eight were senior officers belonging to the PSP cadre; seventeen were junior officers (including police constables and inspectors, such as Salman); and four were officers colloquially designated as ‘rankers’ – junior officers who chart upward mobility from non-gazetted ranks to gazetted posts typically reserved for PSP officers (e.g. a superintendent of police). Interviews were thematically analysed to assess how subordination and institutional fractures affect informal ‘coping mechanisms’, along with their impact on policing provision and quality.

In what follows, I first briefly explore how security consumption impacts the provision of policing. Next, I explore critical debates on colonial and postcolonial policing structures found in contexts such as Pakistan and the insecurity they generate. Thereafter, I develop the concept of ‘strategic informality’. I then draw upon my findings from Karachi to show that when postcolonial policing institutions facilitate structural discrimination and exploitation, officers cope by aligning themselves with the interests of elite clients, patrons and regimes. Resultantly, strategic informality is operationalized, producing varied preferences and performances of policing.

Insecurity and informality in postcolonial contexts

A sociologically informed analysis of security investigates how security is produced and performed by multiple actors, networks and assemblages (Diphoorn and Grassiani, 2016; Goold et al., 2010; Rigakos, 2016). Elite actors and institutions (state and non-state) have competing private interests for which they consume both private and public security. Hence, we must consider how elites consume policework and how the police provide security work. We find state police personnel at private events and residences, and distinct police units providing resources for private consumption. The public police, too, view private citizens as their clients and consumers (Goold et al., 2010; Müller, 2013) and themselves as competitive players in the security market (Loader, 1999).

Police power is essential for the ‘fabrication of a social order’ in which the accumulation of capital renders necessary the complicity of the pacified (Neocleous, 2000). Fundamentally, police power depends upon securing insecurity, for without insecurity the market of security could degenerate and, with that, the social order that sustains capitalist accumulation. Building upon these perspectives on police power, we can interpret policework as a component of this ‘secure insecurity’ agenda (Neocleous, 2011), an agenda that contributes to the commodification of police labour, services and products (Loader, 1999). Furthermore, we know that ‘security fetishism’ enables pacification for specific types of sociopolitical orders. Security fetishism is a symptom of ‘bourgeois insecurity’ (Rigakos, 2016) that desires enhancements in policing and security sectors, including increases in police budgets, without necessarily addressing the vulnerabilities and precarity of workers. Accordingly, if we are to understand how insecurity is secured and how central the police are in the ordering of South Asian societies, the relationships between elites and precarious security workers – and the latter’s vulnerabilities – must be examined relationally.

The centrality of the police in security work and the ‘secure insecurity’ agenda is especially acute in postcolonial contexts where the prioritization of regime security has largely overshadowed that of the people, creating excessive reliance upon repressive and compliant policing institutions under the control of the state (in the case of Africa, see Jaffe and Diphoorn, 2019; Owen, 2016b; in the case of Latin America, see Darke and Khan, 2021; Hönke and Müller, 2012; Müller, 2018). Here, demands for security are inextricably and historically connected to the ‘insatiable’ demands for police protection (Loader, 1999). And the fear and insecurity generated by police malpractice stems from the historical foundations of the police (Boateng and Darko, 2016; Owen, 2016a, 2016b), the lingering ramifications of how imperialism shaped politico-legal systems (Darke and Khan, 2021), and contemporary pacification processes (in the case of Brazil, see Müller, 2018; Salem and Bartelsen 2020). Therefore, to better understand how security consumption depends on and generates the insecurity produced by certain policing practices, we must explore critical perspectives on colonial and postcolonial policing.

Colonial constructions, postcolonial continuities

Traditional scholarship has struggled to incorporate the historical legacies of contemporary policing cultures in former colonies. Here, despite variations in policing systems (Akins, 2022), the colonial-racial logic of policing privileged regime control (rather than crime control or citizen security), oppressing locals and cementing class-based, militaristic divisions in the police that would incentivize rank-and-file officers to mete out state-sanctioned violence and serve an overtly political function (Jaffe and Diphoorn, 2019; Owen, 2016a). More interdisciplinary scholarship has, however, attributed insecurities generated by contemporary policing in former colonies to their experiences with colonial administrations (from Africa, see Boateng and Darko, 2016; Jaffe and Diphoorn, 2019; Owen, 2016b; from India, see Arnold, 1976; Thomas, 2012; from Brazil, see Darke and Khan, 2021; Müller, 2018; Salem and Bartelsen, 2020). This is not just applicable to British colonies, but also to European ones, where, ‘their sometimes-low staffing levels notwithstanding’, the colonial police’s ‘ability to inflict boundless violence on the population’ was remarkable (Blanchard, 2021: 45). This is not to suggest that other institutional fault-lines cannot initiate police excesses, but in our critical analyses of how police meet security demand, we must situate policing against relevant historical and political contexts, where colonial experiences remain unresolved, demanding alternative explanations.

Policing in postcolonial South Asia has seen a prolonged retention of ‘colonial-repressive’ police organizations, despite calls for reform during and after ‘decolonization’ (Baxi, 1982). Furthermore, the police ‘constitute a vulnerable, exploited, and neglected group’, a ‘despised minority’ that is expected to ‘provide [communities] with order and security . . . [without addressing] the sad plight of the police’ (Baxi, 1982: 86–87). To understand both their plight and their despicability, we must address these ‘postcolonial continuities’ (Jaffe and Diphoorn, 2019) and conditions (Waseem, 2022a).

Colonial policing was focused on protecting certain classes (primarily the propertied and colonial class) and those connected to the colonial state and its economic structures (Blanchard, 2021; Thomas, 2012). Hence, it selectively secured a minority group that presided over colonized subjects, and the servitude and obedience of state agents was essential for this enterprise. Such obedience was contingent upon the subjugation of lower-ranked officers, a majority of whom were ‘native’. These ‘subordinates’ were subject to what Baxi (1982) called ‘hierarchical tyranny’, in which the militarized command structure of the police enforced strict obedience and discipline. This was necessary, in part, for allowing the regime to displace blame onto indigenous workers and distance elite British officers from torture and corruption allegations (Heath, 2021). Its reliance on indigenous police officers was a product of the colonial state’s own ‘inherent weakness’, and police violence was a ‘product of [the state’s] real and perceived vulnerabilities’ (Heath, 2021: 29). Reliance upon the same structures in postcolonial regimes is thus symptomatic of postcolonial state fragility and regime insecurity (Owen, 2016b).

Despite this focus on discipline, order within the ranks suffered from structural discrimination. Even where officers from marginalized groups and native communities were initially promoted to senior positions, these manoeuvrings were for burdening Indian officers with additional administrative duties that senior officers preferred to avoid, resulting in periodic conflict between Indian deputies and British superintendents (Campion, 2003). Institutional order was equally vulnerable to class-based discrimination: native officers were overworked and underpaid, strategically employed to cost-effectively suppress resistance, which created work-related disaffection among the rank and file (Jauregui, 2021). Their grievances included poor working conditions, stagnated promotions and limited retirement prospects (Campion, 2003). Institutional corruption was rampant, and somewhat overlooked, if not enabled: subordinates were given a ‘free reign’ for extortion and petty harassment. Such informal discretion gave subordinates opportunities for ‘entering into networks of bribery, regular payment and patronage with [labourers, hawkers and transport workers]’, as public resentment towards the police grew (Gooptu, 2001: 134). Furthermore, ‘restraining the use of force was never considered a priority, or even a reality’ (Blanchard, 2018: 1842).

The police, especially the subordinates (i.e. indigenous, non-gazetted officers typically recruited from working-class backgrounds), were thus utilized by the colonial state as ‘security tools’ to instil insecurity without undermining the interests of the regime (Heath, 2021). These subjugated workers became critical to the ‘secure insecurity’ agenda of the colonial state. Predatory practices of the police, the interpersonal relations they forged with the local elite, their ‘clannishness’ and the derisory attitudes shown to them by the state created the conditions necessary for structural and institutional problems. Such ‘defects’ were predominantly the product of the physical and monetary exploitation of subordinate police workers (Heath, 2021). As Jauregui (2022) informs, one of the core continuities in policing in postcolonial South Asia is the ‘structured exploitation’ of these officers.

How has this exploitation impacted postcolonial policing institutions in countries such as Pakistan? We know that it was politically convenient, even necessary, for newly independent states to adopt these colonial institutions (Boateng and Darko, 2016; Mukhopadhyay, 1997). There was a continued desire to prioritize regime security and political policing in the face of state fragility, at times resulting from civil–military conflicts, as in the case of Pakistan (Waseem, 2022a). But it was also due to the ‘successful capture of the police by post-independence elites’ who replaced the ‘old colonial masters’ (Jackson et al., 2014: 1069). Furthermore, a disproportionate focus remained on strengthening militarism, subordination and subservience. This was enabled by a hierarchical structure that remained largely untouched since its development in the 19th century and provided the state a ‘particular kind of (unfree) labour’ (Owen, 2016b: 313). This ensured loyalty to postcolonial elites, though not necessarily to the institution of the police itself, which was equally marked by fragility and continued to dehumanize officers. Postcolonial policing structures, as found in Pakistan, offered limited opportunities for upward mobility, which routinized ‘quasi-official servitude at the bottom to those higher up and, further, [reflected and reinforced] class and caste inequalities that [pervaded] societies at large’ (Jauregui, 2021: 430).

Such inequality was also entrenched by punishing disobedience by subordinates through frequent dismissals, transfers, suspensions, and ‘authoritarian and arbitrary decision-making’, especially by senior officers (Baxi, 1982: 84), indicating pervasive job insecurity, which continues to the present time. Moreover, being underfunded and ill-equipped meant that police workers have had an ‘illusion of actual power [but] with limited resources’ that sustains their economic and professional insecurities (Owen, 2016b: 303). It is unsurprising, therefore, that there is a tense relationship between managerial officers and the rank and file, wherein the latter continue to be exploited by the former, as well as by those with political clout. Because of this, subordinates have persisted with their predatory practices, equally enabled by consumers and clients willing to pay for policing services. As an editorial from 1987 described the state of policing in postcolonial Pakistan, ‘A half-literate, poorly-paid cop with little self-respect is easy-pickings for anyone “higher up” or with enough money to buy him’ (Sadeque, 1987).

Due to these interpersonal relations developed with local elites, a co-dependent relationship exists between postcolonial elites and the police, sometimes described as the ‘politicization of the police’ (Verma, 2016) or a symptom of ‘VIP culture’. ⁴ A particular component of such overt interference in policework has been the pacification of police officers (both subordinate and supervisory) in order to secure elite interests above those of the masses. Hence, the postcolonial police are frequently referred to as the ‘properties’ of the ruling class (Boateng and Darko, 2016; Owen, 2016a). In other words, the commodification of policing and the consumption of security has exacerbated class-based inequalities not just beyond but equally within the institution of the police in Pakistan.

Insecurity and strategic informality

Owing to these historical and institutional trajectories, police officers remain intensely dependent upon informal, flexible and creative means (jugaad – see Jauregui, 2016) and seek opportunities beyond their formal roles. Exploring informality in policework establishes how the interconnectedness between private security consumption, regime protection and public policing intersects with the structural divides within the postcolonial police and its insecure agents, whose subjugation enables the exploitation of public security resources, facilitating informal relationships and practices.

As Roy (2012) reminds us, informalization does not happen outside the state but is often instigated by it: the state defines what is informal and formal, and state actors can ‘straddle formal and informal arrangements’ (Guarneros-Meza and Jenss, 2022: 618). We must therefore consider how informality serves instrumental and strategic purposes for public officials and elites (Haid and Hilbrandt, 2019). Works on state institutions and street-level bureaucrats, for example, stress the importance of informality in official work and the lucrative advantages it yields for public-facing officials, allowing them to differentiate between ‘clients’ on the basis of socio-economic considerations (Lipsky, 1980), sometimes allowing ‘the powerful’ to circumvent legal processes (Kusiak, 2019).

Scholarship on policing and security has also noted the relevance of informality (Guarneros-Meza and Jenss, 2022), especially where the workers’ precarity is born out of weak employment opportunities, lack of representation and the overarching ‘regime of humiliation’ that affects workers’ occupational identity and self-worth (Gooptu, 2013). Informalization in policework is thus perceived as a relational exercise that has ‘constructive power’ and is sometimes necessary for dispute resolution, especially in sociopolitical environments in which police and security are provided in inequitable and unequal ways (Kyed, 2017).

In such contexts, both elites and non-elites rely upon the police’s ability to operate ‘off the books’ to informally harness police power and circumvent the rigid structures of formal justice mechanisms (Cooper-Knock and Owen, 2015; Hornberger, 2004). Seen this way, informality is not just reducible to corruption or abuses of discretion, but encapsulates a range of complex social exchanges, bureaucratic practices, security work and labour deemed essential for everyday policing (Vigneswaran and Hornberger, 2009). Informality is thus not only necessitated by institutional constraints, but also expected by audiences and consumers of policework, especially the elite. In exchange, informality can facilitate economic activities that officers pursue for career advancement and professional gains (Owen, 2016a) or to meet ad hoc demands placed upon them under extreme situations and circumstances (Waseem, 2022b).

However, informality in the context of public security provision remains undertheorized. Both state elites and communities operationalize and instrumentalize informality in policing in postcolonial states (Hamilton and Black, 2023; Roy, 2005). Elsewhere, I have discussed this as a core feature of the ‘postcolonial condition of policing’ in Pakistan (Waseem, 2022a). Such informality may serve as a ‘source of relief’, but, as Bierschenk (2008) argues, risks depriving legal systems of legitimacy and challenges legal provisions, creating a ‘negative feedback loop’.

In defining strategic informality, I focus my attention on the utility of informal practices for police officers, thus returning to the initial debates that see informality as a product of ‘constant struggle for survival and self-development’ (Bayat, 2007: 579). Informal life and associated practices have been viewed as ‘a modality of bottom-up agency’ that provides ‘a repertoire of survival strategies’ (Haid and Hilbrandt, 2019: 556). In postcolonial policing systems, informality thrives on the vulnerability of subordinate (especially street-level) officers who seek out creative and interest-based relationships beyond legally defined parameters of discretion to meet the security-centric demands placed on them by both public and private actors, especially given the possibilities that such structures of policing institutions and insecurities of state and private elites create for officer networking, bargaining and alliance-making.

Strategic informality allows vulnerable subordinates to ‘cope with their predicaments’ arising from social and institutional discrimination and the ‘insecurity-inducing strategies’ (Gooptu, 2013: 33) that keep officers ‘in line’ through prevailing professional uncertainties. When career risk can jeopardize an officer’s professional prospects (Owen, 2013), officers resort to ‘strategic navigation’ – or ‘deploying agency’ through a ‘mix of evasion, dissembling, and . . . navigation of opportunities available to them’ (Owen, 2016a: 39). They establish interpersonal and patron–client relations that may secure prosperous promotions and preferred postings. Strategic informality may encompass both strategic relational navigations and the public-facing policing behaviours and practices produced during or because of such navigation and associated patron–client relations (such as the acceptance of bribes or extrajudicial violence).

Therefore, I define strategic informality as the calculated reliance upon a range of institutionalized practices and relationships that are created, communicated and enforced outside, and sometimes in violation of, officially sanctioned channels (Helmke and Levitsky, 2004), to meet institutional and individual demand and fulfil personal or professional objectives that would otherwise be inaccessible. Thus, the use of strategic informality materializes professional and personal gains for officers (e.g. financial rewards and career advancement) and allows subordinates to navigate, challenge or ‘undo’ their rank, where the presence of a rank is ‘perceived as a barrier rather than a resource’ (Davis, 2020: 449).

These institutionalized informal practices are varied and can range from petty harassment to extrajudicial executions, as seen in the case of Brazil (Denyer-Willis, 2015). In her seminal work on vigilantism, Bateson encourages scholars to consider links between formal institutions and vigilantism (which, as per Bateson and Cooper-Knock and Owen, may also include state agents), and refers to vigilantism as a ‘classic example of an informal institution that competes with a formal institution’ (Bateson, 2021: 937). Here, I suggest that institutional dynamics, designs and structures (such as those inherited by Pakistan’s police forces) can facilitate a reliance upon strategic informality in police and security work, which can include forms of police vigilantism, as well as other discretionary, illegal and extra-legal policing behaviours.

Harnessing the idea of ‘informality’ does not negate the importance of police ‘discretion’. While discretion is an exercise of police power born out of ‘situational exigencies’ (Bittner, 1970: 131) and ‘structural determinants’ (Bittner, 1970: 6–14), its emphases are on police performance in relation to the law. Strategic informality recognizes this feature of routine policing but sees both the nature and extent of discretion in practice and the reliance on practices outside and beyond the law as contextual, dictated by relationality and social and relational anxieties and preferences, born out of historical and cultural experiences, rather than the parameters of the law or the ‘leeway’ given to police as part of their ‘legal freedoms’ (Cooper-Knock and Owen, 2015).

The concept of strategic informality may help us contextualize a range of policing and security network-building and performance-indicating exercises within their complicated sociopolitical and relational environments. Nevertheless, the practice of strategic informality can facilitate ‘selective policing and strategic tolerance of illegality’ and extra-legality, such as police corruption and excessive violence, especially where such practices serve as ‘engine[s] of local patronage politics’ (Müller, 2013: 550), as in Brazil (Fischer, 2008; see also Müller, 2013) or in service of a ‘party–police nexus’, as observed in Bangladesh (Jackman and Maitrot, 2022). This reliance upon informality is not due to institutional pressures, but is a mode of operations encouraged, endorsed or ignored during the creation of policies that elites know will be implemented by street-level officers through extra-legal and ‘creative’ means (Waseem, 2022b). ⁵ Viewed in this way, ‘informality’ is not simply interchangeable with ‘discretion’, but may include a range of practices sanctioned by the ruling elite.

Thus, strategic informality provides a critical framework for understanding institutional, individual and political preferences that facilitate the messy realities of policing (Vigneswaran and Hornberger, 2009). While the police have multiple audiences within state and society, here I focus on relationships between elite demand and police performance, and show how the intersection of the two depends upon strategic utilization of informality, producing varied forms of activities not sanctioned through formal or legal channels, including corruption, which has been seen as an informalization strategy by Bierschenk (2008), and ‘police vigilantism’ (Cooper-Knock and Owen, 2015).

Offering this framework is a response to scholarship exploring informality and its ‘constructive power’ in the fields of public policing, justice and security in postcolonial societies more generally (Bierschenk, 2008; Guarneros-Meza and Jenns, 2022; Hamilton and Black, 2023). It also speaks to Hönke and Müller’s (2012) suggestion in this journal to acknowledge the ‘limitations and non-universality of European analytical categories’, recognizing perhaps that conditions such as informality, uncertainty and ‘provisionality’ are also ‘basic conditions’ that require ‘their own analytical lens’. Therefore, I suggest that, in postcolonial societies, the provision of both policing and security relies upon informality as an essential coping mechanism. This phenomenon can occur when demands for security provision in societies ridden with extreme regime insecurity and security fetishism interface with officers’ insecurities, wherein subordinates are both pacified and tasked to pacify the masses.

In the following sections, I draw upon my findings from Pakistan to explore institutional discrimination at work, and discuss the social and institutional dynamics that enable the exploitation of police subordinates and the extraction of policing resources in the face of ever-increasing security demand. These dynamics create space for mobilizing strategic informality not only for material gains, but also for manifesting police ‘vigilantism’ through the creation of ‘kingpins’ and the sanctioning of ‘encounter killings’. These social and institutional dynamics are not the only dynamics that facilitate corruption and police violence, but in certain contexts strategic informality can be a significant determinant of how policing is provided. Later, I draw upon the case of a former officer who strategically navigated institutional constraints, in the context of increasing security demand and the ‘war on terror’, and operationalized relational and practical dynamics of informality. This has had a lasting impact on other officers who, confronted with similar barriers, have internalized the importance of meeting security demand through strategic navigation and extrajudicial violence. These findings demonstrate how imperial legacies and contemporary conflicts collectively shape security governance and police provision in postcolonial contexts.

Structures of suppression: The case of Pakistan

Profitable pawns

Class-based structural institutional designs and officers’ positions within such hierarchies shape the latter’s self-worth, alignment and behaviours in many ways, impacting their interactions with colleagues, supervisors and patrons. When policing resources (including workers) are extracted and exploited, this extraction relies not just upon officer subordination but also upon a mutual capability of both officers and the actors with whom they interact to establish informal networks or patron–client relations for material and monetary benefits. Employing informality thus becomes a strategic choice for officers faced with personal, professional and even physical insecurities with ever-increasing external demands.

As mentioned above, Pakistan’s police forces are divided into two tiers: the federally recruited gazetted officers belonging to the prestigious Police Services of Pakistan (‘the PSPs’ or senior officers) and the provincially recruited rank and file (junior officers). ⁶ This division has sustained long-lasting tensions between supervisory and subordinate officers. During my attachments with the police, subordinates frequently complained of class-based grievances, of their derogatory treatment at the hands of their gazetted supervisors, enabled by their socio-economic status and working-class backgrounds. This is demonstrated starkly by how senior officers describe subordinate policemen as ‘untouchables’, echoed in one officer’s own admission that ‘the gazetted officer of the PSP thinks he is a Brahmin [upper caste] and that his subordinates, the non-gazetted, are achhoot [untouchables]’ (Interview 1). ⁷

These grievances are further exacerbated by PSPs impinging upon the ability of subordinates to informally network with local criminals for monetary gains, thus dismantling their power:

There are cultural differences between gazetted officers and non-gazetted officers. Some PSPs like to weaken the station-house officer ⁸ by busting his criminal networks and suspending him. This demoralizes the station-level officer. What the PSPs don’t understand is that they cannot take the same risks as their subordinates. They are not that bold. (Interview 2)

This sentiment was echoed by a constable who similarly asserted his preference for ‘rankers’ (select subordinates who climb to PSP ranks because of their informal practices and networking) because of their acceptance of informality, including petty corruption:

When PSPs want to discipline us, they cut from our salaries, which makes us suffer and we cannot work. We then have to take money from alternative means. Rankers behave better with the rank and file; they know we take money through other sources like bribes, but they also know we are standing on duty all night long. They’ll let it go. (Interview 3)

This is not to suggest, however, that PSPs do not depend upon their subordinates to operate beyond formal and legal constraints. As another constable explained, strategic informality that manifests in routine corruption within police stations directly relates to the demands of the elite cadre:

As an investigating officer, when a poor man brings a case to me, I must tell him to pay me a grand for my PSP bosses, and then additional money for legal procedures, the courts, etc. I feel bad, but their case file will not move forward if I cannot warm my bosses’ pockets. I have recently paid 3000 rupees out of my own pocket because people in my thaana [police station] could not get their case registered if I didn’t pay for everything and everyone. Even so, we are the only ones who get dirty, even when we not lining our own pockets! (Interview 4)

While this discussion of different police subcultures and routine police corruption is not unique to my case study, what is relevant is the way the subculture of the lower tier is allowed to nurture dependency on informal practices, networks and relationships.

For instance, external networks that create financially beneficial arrangements between subordinates, supervisors and bribe-paying civilians may be too lucrative even for seniors to dismantle. Interviewees detailed how PSPs rely upon their subordinates to partake in ‘profitable’ practices:

Certain inspectors are strong, more profitable. They provide money to their bosses on top, the PSPs. Their patronage operates in two ways: there’s political patronage and then there’s internal, officer patronage. In both cases, job satisfaction is quantified in monetary terms. A profitable inspector will gauge what his patron needs: money, loyalty or security. The inspector has no job security; his posting is contingent upon his relations with political and police bosses. Therefore, he must bear the ‘fatigue’ [the financial burden]. (Interview 5)

The subordinates thus learn that becoming ‘profitable’ is a coping strategy within an institution that represses them. This profitability can curry favour not just with senior officers but also with external, elite patrons. One interviewee explained how informality enables ‘VIP’ consumption of policing goods and services:

There is a money exchanger here, where every two months a criminal incident takes place. So, I’ll deploy four of my men. Suddenly, my supervisor will issue an order saying that my men are being relocated for ‘security duties’. What are these duties? They are for those high-up people who talk big about Pakistan’s prosperity. Why don’t they stop pulling and misusing police resources for their own ‘VIP’ habits? And if they really need to satisfy such security habits, why don’t they take from private security companies – there are so many of those in this city! And then, a criminal incident will take place at the money exchanger, and we will get blamed. By extracting from our already limited resources, these VIPs are actively fostering insecurity. (Interview 6)

Another inspector exemplified these dynamics by explaining how the construction of ‘security zones’ in Karachi, a formal process, has empowered ‘VIPs’ to informally extract police sources to satiate their ‘security fetishism’:

Security zones were designed to determine where a chunk of security services would be deployed. Eventually, elite influences started flooding in, demanding more police presence and facilities for politicians and their friends. Now, my boss can order police infrastructure and constables from any thaana to go on a security duty when a political strongman demands security protocol. And they always take the best infrastructure, leaving less for the rest of us, expecting that we will resort to unofficial means to make ends meet. Isn’t what they’re doing corruption, too? I mean, I’m not saying don’t do corruption, but do as much as is necessary. (Interview 7)

But how does this dependency upon strategic informality (created by both internal and external pressures) impact policing in beyond monetary or material ways?

As I show below, in the context of heightened insecurity due to prolonged periods of violence in postcolonial Pakistan, along with the types of security-centric demands, appropriation of police resources, exploitation of police workers (e.g. by ‘VIPs’) and institutional discrimination in which rank works against subordinates described above, operationalizing informality in police/security work has had at least two additional observable outcomes: the rise of police ‘kingpins’ and the persistence of extrajudicial and extra-legal practices, including ‘police vigilantism’.

Making ‘Dirty Harrys’

Despite institutionalizing a two-tiered system, the police have unofficially sustained a unique category of officers, the ‘rankers’: rank-and-file (junior) officers who are patronized by the institution or external stakeholders (e.g. politicians or influential businessmen) are selectively promoted to positions otherwise reserved for PSPs. Their entrance into the PSP cadre through such promotions is resented by the PSPs, but their autonomy is idolized by subordinates otherwise frozen in the hierarchy.

In Karachi, the term ‘rankers’ colloquially refers to officers who have outperformed both their juniors and their supervisors, a performance usually measured in terms of their ability to operate above the law in ways that include (but are not limited to) orchestrating ‘encounter killings’, an extrajudicial practice justified by prevailing insecurity (e.g. the threat posed by the MQM, discussed earlier). Such extrajudicial practices symbolize the autonomy afforded to select officers for informally protecting the interests of the political elite, so long as the threat to the preferred order is pacified. ⁹ As one officer explained, rankers typically come from socio-economically deprived and marginalized areas, and there are monetary considerations born out of institutional discrimination that collectively foster dependency on extrajudicial police practices, encouraging officers to ‘do what they can to please gazetted officers, including torture and extrajudicial killings’ (Interview 8).

The construction of rankers and the use of junior officers to partake in such informal police practices are products of elite security demands, as well as the rewards bestowed on subordinate officers for such practices. These ‘Dirty Harrys’ of Pakistan also earn the respect of subordinates through the risks they take on the job. ¹⁰ For their highhandedness against violent criminals, some of them have been directly attacked. One such officer was Chaudhury Aslam, who was killed in 2014. The threat of physical insecurity, sacrifice and death in the line of duty for allegedly preserving national security leads to the formation of strong allegiances between select officers and patrons, at the cost of loyalty towards the institution. Aslam’s subordinates, for example, relied on their patrons to keep them personally and professionally secure both in the aftermath of Aslam’s death and, earlier, when Aslam was briefly suspended and arrested. For their protection, Aslam had personally requested his own patrons within the police to physically and financially protect these loyal subordinates. According to one officer, there is a ‘shared sense of insecurity that breeds loyalty’ (Interview 9). For some of these officers, this shared sense of insecurity resonated with that of Officer Salman who had seen his counterparts killed by party workers of the MQM. These informal alliances and shared insecurities, exacerbated by both police and patron’s mistrust of formal legal institutions/pathways, create justifications for officers deploying police vigilantism. As one ranker explained:

Suppose there is a killer who has murdered people and has political support. We arrest him and interrogate him. The next day, the legal community will be on our heads, making noise in courts, saying that we have tortured confessions out of him. Now, if this ‘target killer’ ¹¹ has killed our own police officers, how can we tolerate that? Then, we are impelled into encounter killings. (Interview 10)

In Karachi, the strengthening of such informal alliances for career advancement coincided with the routinization of ‘encounter killings’. One inspector explained how extrajudicial killing is still sometimes permitted, professionally rewarded and institutionalized as a strategy of survival:

When I joined the police, I thought nobody should be killed without just cause. Then, one day, we got intelligence that some ‘target killers’ would visit a neighbourhood to meet their friends. I am a sniper-shooter, with training in the anti-terror squad. I shot one target while he was running. Later, we informed the higher-ups that ‘we had hunted the fish’. Then, we collected the bodies and took them to the police station. But we handed them over to the paramilitary force and let them take credit. It was for our own safety. Otherwise, my team would have come under a retaliatory attack from the MQM. After this incident, I received an ‘out-of-turn promotion’. ¹² It’s a psychology of survival: if we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us. (Interview 11)

The informal permission granted to rank-and-file officers to partake in extrajudicial practices is not just granted by senior ranks, but has, at times, been weaponized through narratives of warfare and national security. As a senior officer who served during the operations of the 1990s recounted:

There were moral justifications given to the police for acting against the law; we honestly thought this was like saving the country, that the MQM was our enemy. You know, these things happen in wartime. (Interview 12)

Therefore, ‘encounters’ are symptomatic of the strategic alliances made between public and private actors and select officers through networks of patronage for securing private interests (such as weakening political opposition). Above, an inspector recounted a working relationship with a paramilitary force (a branch of the army). Below, another ranker explains how politicians, too, informally allow extrajudicial practices to persist for political gains:

There is a war going on here. I have worked with intelligence agencies and the army. The army knows my work and has rewarded me for taking revenge for the killing of their soldier. The same goes for provincial political parties here; one of the political leaders said to me, ‘you have saved this country’ by doing the kind of policing I do [a reference to extrajudicial killings]. (Interview 13)

As this officer suggests, strategic informality, operationalized through networking, alliance-making, extrajudicial practices and the promise of lucrative rewards, becomes part of the coping mechanisms subordinate officers devise to strengthen their agency. This becomes a way for subordinates to ‘transcend’ their ‘subalternity’ (Jauregui, 2016; Owen, 2016a) or navigate their rank within postcolonial institutions. This, as one officer explained, is critical for their social mobility, which comes ‘not necessarily through the law but the fringe benefits of the alliances made, and the informal work done’:

Strategic alliances or patronage are based on two things. The first is work or performance. When they’re transferred or promoted, PSPs and rankers both often move with their own core teams – their inspectors, tech people, security guards, etc. The subordinates within these teams can be used for the work of their patrons, because the patrons know their work is good. The flipside to this is that those core team members are given licences to do things that others cannot. The other type of relationship is based on money. If a PSP officer is corrupt, he will set up a line for the money to come up the chain of command, starting from the rank and file. For the subordinates, both these pathways are for navigating the institution for good, lucrative positions and fringe benefits. (Interview 9)

Subordinates learn that such ‘fringe benefits’, which can improve their socio-economic position, do not come through loyalty to the institution, operating ‘by the book’ or formal channels. A subordinate’s upward mobility is slow and contingent upon interpersonal relations, which increases reliance upon informality:

I am trying to push for my son to be recruited into the police. Once I retire, in a few years, my government home will be taken from me. I don’t have any other property. If my son joins the police, we will be able to keep our home because of his job. So, I must network, talk to the high-ups, see that he is hired. (Interview 14)

These interpersonal relations can be formed not just with state or public actors but also with private businessmen or influential elites, with whom the police form strong ‘patron–client exchanges’. This benefits not just subordinates but also opportunistic senior officers who rely upon ‘spontaneous informalization and privatization’ (Bierschenk, 2008: 105) practices:

Businessmen take advantage of PSPs and give them [petrol] pumps and shares in their private business ventures. This silent partnership is allowed. There are many ways of informally making money and taking bribes. (Interview 15)

Beyond monetary interests, however, these alliances are critical for ‘strategically navigating’ a hierarchical structure in which a subordinate’s rank creates barriers to progress. To resist these barriers, officers informally turn to allies in other institutions for assistance in influencing their upward mobility. As one officer implied, private political interests that are couched in the language of national security and that enable extrajudicial police practices impact officers’ sense of attachment to their own institution:

The drawback to such security policies is that some subordinates cosy up to the [intelligence] agencies. They go and give information to military officers. Then, instead of a senior police officer doing ‘transfer postings’, sometimes you’ll have an army major influencing transfers and postings of select officers. When that happens, why would a police officer be loyal to his own organization? His loyalties will lie elsewhere. Why? Because our own institution and seniors don’t stand with us; they don’t respect their sipahi [foot-soldier]. (Interview 16)

These perceptions explain how networking and navigation activities that challenge class-based and structural limitations facilitate reliance upon strategic informality. The manifestation of the latter and its impact on police work can be witnessed most starkly through the case of Rao Anwar, once considered Karachi’s ‘super cop’ (Express Tribune, 2019).

Work, warfare and warlords

The case of Rao Anwar provides an example of a ‘ranker’, a ‘kingpin’ whose career progressed during the operations of the 1990s owing to relationships he established with political and security elites (including military and intelligence agencies), and who patronized junior officers in return. Like Salman and Aslam, Anwar joined the police as sub-inspector and strategically utilized informality (including rent-seeking, alliance-making and extrajudiciality) to render himself ‘indispensable’, transcend institutional barriers, and acquire both financial profits and professional security (Abbas, 2020). Among the tactics employed was the use of police resources to facilitate the evacuation of residents from land deemed profitable for private developers, investors and military officers. In addition to such ‘land-grabbing’, Anwar was accused of overseeing the excavation and mining of lucrative soil from areas where he was posted (Zaman and Ali, 2018). Like Salman and Aslam, Anwar was a product of the prevailing political uncertainty that led the ruling elite to patronize subordinates to restore a preferred social order. In Karachi, political violence has been long couched in the language of ‘war’ and ‘counterinsurgency’. Consequently, since at least the 1980s, officers have been expected to operate above and beyond the law. As a senior police officer who participated in the 1990s operations confessed:

During the 90s, there was an insurgency by the MQM. Unfortunately, we did things we should not be proud of. We killed people; there were extrajudicial killings. We didn’t have the sense or capacity to take things through the normal route; we did lots of things beyond the law. It haunts me. But we were told that ‘we are at war’, that the MQM is funded by Pakistan’s enemies, that ‘we’re saving the country’. This is what our patrons told us, and what we told our jawans [soldiers]. There was so much pressure to put things in order. (Interview 17)

In 2015, during another security operation in Karachi, this author interviewed Anwar, who was then widely popular and at the peak of his career. Anwar’s words echoed the sentiments of his superior (above), two decades after the operations against the MQM. Anwar, too, justified this dirty work on grounds of national security, claiming that when courts are unable to dispense justice and there is a ‘state of war’, then ‘encounters’ are the state’s ‘response for saving the country’ (Interview 18). Anwar’s words demonstrated the internalization of regime insecurity that has been amplified since the ‘war on terror’, but also by prior periods of armed resistance against regimes, during which officers are incentivized to mobilize informality in everyday work and satisfy political elites.

In 2018, Anwar’s team was found to have been involved in the extrajudicial killing of an innocent civilian. Anwar lost institutional support and was unceremoniously ousted and arrested. ¹³ Nevertheless, private conversations with Anwar’s subordinates after his arrest reveal how this ranker continued to be perceived as an ally to those at the bottom of the hierarchy and how his reliance upon informality continued to be justified by narratives of warfare and insecurity. Anwar’s subordinates commended him for ‘ridding insurgents from the areas in which he operated’, at the behest of ruling elites:

PSPs lack empathy for us. They think we are achhoot [untouchable]. But Anwar took care of us, especially the poor subordinates. He paid for our kids’ education. If someone’s family member passed away, Anwar made sure that funeral expenses were covered. Since Anwar’s arrest, our morale has diminished. . .. He was not responsible for what happened. In wartime, these things happen. When there is an airstrike, you can’t see everything on the ground. You don’t always know who is being killed. It was wartime in Karachi. When PSPs don’t support someone like Anwar, the message to us [the rank and file] is clear: nobody will support us. Why should we risk our lives and careers now? (Interview 19)

Officers confirmed that Anwar’s and Aslam’s protection of subordinates personified them as ‘warlords’ operating independent ‘fiefdoms’ in which officers loyal to them could be posted and transferred to favourable positions. The descriptor ‘warlord’ resonates with Jauregui’s (2014) characterization of select officers in India as ‘kingpins’. Simultaneously, Anwar’s case also reflects the external patronage, from ruling elites, provided to officers like Salman, Aslam and Anwar. As an interlocutor explained:

There are state and capitalist interests at stake. If I am a land-grabber, or connected with a ruling political party, I will want to have such officers on my side to protect my interests, my assets. Anwar came into being because a prominent politician was looking around for loyalists in the police. There are always people, even army officers, on the look-out for such pliable men. Everyone wants their capital protected. (Interview 9)

In this way, Anwar’s case demonstrates how ruling elites, both public and private, utilize the security work – often ‘dirty work’ – performed by subordinates as a way of furthering their own interests. As Heath (2021) explains, during colonial rule, such expendable workers were necessary for their ‘security value’, to be used as ‘security tools’ by the colonial regime. In postcolonial India, such ‘incessant dirty work’ accompanies the ‘conflicting demands and duties of order keeping’ (Jauregui, 2016: 156). In postcolonial Pakistan, subordinates have internalized how the informality that enables such work offers currency for curbing their expendability. According to one officer, these dynamics are likely to be sustained:

Security workers like Anwar carved out space for themselves and filled a vacuum because they were problem-solvers. They are created in response to the security demands and pressures placed on a system. Then, ‘normal’ policing is not possible. Then you need officers who will go the extra mile to get results and deliver in extreme political circumstances. Whenever you have these extreme circumstances, and an institution that allows such fiefdoms, these officers will pop up. As they become bigger, their revenues and monetary gains increase. Out-of-turn promotions mean they can match their weight with the rank. Anwar was the victim of his circumstances. His methods were raw and unsophisticated. That’s why he got into trouble. But there will be others like him. (Interview 20)

Anwar’s case demonstrates an extreme manifestation of strategic informality that is produced from the interconnectedness between competing security demands met through the patronage of public workers and an institutional design of the police that necessitates subordinates’ reliance upon creative ways of navigating themselves and securing great personal and professional gains. It also represents the insecurity faced by subordinate ‘subaltern’ police officers (Jauregui, 2016) deemed ‘expendable’ by the ruling elite, ready to be replaced by incoming subalterns who will similarly learn to navigate class-based limitations opportunistically. Above all, it demonstrates the impact that this relationship between elite demand and postcolonial structures has on the provision of policing, and how informality enables the persistence of extrajudicial violence and monetary corruption.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that strategic informality is an important coping mechanism for state officials, especially lower-ranked officers, employed within structures from where they are patronized by both public and private actors in pursuit of security, be that for the protection of political or financial capital. I demonstrate how strategic informality is enabled by certain facilitating conditions that must be read against their postcolonial contexts and historical institutional designs, wherein officers remain vulnerable owing to their marginalization and precariousness, and thus strategically navigate interpersonal relations both within and beyond their institution, forming advantageous allegiances. Upon successful navigation, several officers are then empowered by these informal relations, receiving patronage from elite public and private actors, to resort to ‘off-the-book’, extra-legal, even illegal behaviours, while simultaneously attempting to render themselves indispensable. Extra-legal violence or monetary corruption are then symptoms of this calculated reliance upon mobilizing informality in politically fruitful ways. This is not to suggest that non-elites do not expect informality in police work (as discussed by Hornberger, 2013; Kyed, 2017), but that elites play a particularly powerful role in ensuring the continuation of colonial logics of policing.

As we find in Pakistan, the profitability of vulnerable security workers who can act informally is central to both the institution of the police and its patrons. Consequently, subjugated subordinates attempt to transcend barriers to mobility. Simultaneously, these patron–client relations between police officers and their political patrons and the subsequent tolerance, if not direct facilitation, of strategic informality render possible a complex array of ‘dirty practices’ that observers sometimes reductively classify as corruption and extrajudicial violence or even vigilantism, without duly accounting for the structural and relational processes that legitimize such security work and performance. Thus, strategic informality is enabled, to a large extent, by the insecurity of security workers and the exploitation of security labour (Jauregui, 2021, 2022).

Future research could theoretically and empirically connect the perceived utility of strategic informality as applicable to policing to other phenomena typically found in postcolonial and Southern contexts, such as state fragility and urban informality (Roy, 2005, 2012). The ideas presented here may also extend emerging scholarship that views informality as a feature of Western state bureaucracies but typically describe it as ‘innovation’ (Jaffe and Koster, 2019). Finally, the discussion of strategic informality as being rooted in the postcolonial structures, colonial designs and prevailing insecurity found in South Asia does not preclude it from becoming an analytical tool across disciplines and geographies. Indeed, its utility across contexts may even further contemporary conversations on the ‘cross-fertilization’ and ‘imperial feedback loops’ between policing methods and philosophies that connect colonial/postcolonial regimes to the ‘metropoles’. To echo Blanchard (2021), empirically demonstrating postcolonial continuities is a delicate but important task.