The political economy of policing in Zimbabwe: Changing roles, practice and identities in relationship to peace, security and development

Abstract

This thesis examines policing within the context of security and development, with particular reference to ways in which the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) operates in the wider political economy of Zimbabwean state in response to decades of financial crisis. Guided by the social constructionist philosophy and structural political economy analysis, the case study demonstrates that, through a range of commercial activities, the ZRP has been able to shift police preoccupation from ‘what is routinely important’ to ‘what works’ as part of resilience and adaptability in one of the world’s distorted economies. In cases where the police lack sufficient budget support from the government they recalibrate into self-organized systems and devise ways in which they raise the much needed revenue for policing. Using interpretive content analysis for secondary data and thematic analysis for in-depth interviews, the other finding relates to the ways in which the ZRP deploys neoliberal registers of ‘sustainable development’ and economic nationalist discourses to legitimise its involvement in commercial activities in farms, mines, tourism and social welfare businesses. Commercial activities involve distribution of wealth, power and interests. As such, what started off as productive entrepreneurship to ‘make ends meet’ slipped into unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. The latter has made the police institution gets to a breakdown as different categories of officers split into different commercial units as they compete for access and control. To date, there is little literature that foregrounds the experiences and views of the police officers on the political economy of policing and it is to this literature this thesis primarily contributes. Inadvertently, as the ZRP responds to the economic crisis, it sometimes uses violence against citizens. The violence is sometimes quite targeted and deliberate as the police use metal spiked bars to clampdown motorists in demand of bribe money. The findings suggest that the police operating in a context of budget cuts are highly unlikely to be people-oriented.