The Introduction presents the main arguments advanced in the book, details the methodology used, and describes the structure followed. As an institutional ethnography of inland migration policing, the book examines the growing emphasis on borders in policing, and describes the range of challenges, dilemmas, and contradictions that the task of maintaining order and exercising state power in an interconnected and polarized world animate. State power, as wielded by the officers I observed, defies the Weberian rational paradigm of bureaucracy and unsettles conventional models, built on rigid rules and constrained discretion, since to a large extent it relies on non-rational, magic-like elements to solve policing problems in an increasingly complex world. The random, confusing, and informal nature of power in this domain also pervades questions of access and negotiations to research its institutions, and ultimately shaped the fate of this study. In attending to and making sense of these border paradoxes, I rely on an eclectic theoretical scaffold drawing from a wide range of sociological and anthropological accounts of the police and the state in diverse settings, including the bourgeoning policing literature on postcolonial societies in the global South, and place emphasis on the global and historical continuities and connections in the police’s institutional practices and cultural norms.
‘Datafication’: making sense of (big) data in a complex world
