Guests:

• Peter Albrecht is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. He has expertise in the fields of security, peace and development, both as a set of international policies and as individual programmatic approaches to reforming military, police, intelligence, judicial and oversight actors.
• Helene Marie Kyed is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. She has expertise in the fields of policing, security and justice provision with focus on local dynamics and the interaction between formal and informal institutions.
• Maya Mynster Christensen is a postdoc researcher at the Danish Institute against Torture. She has expertise in the fields of militia mobilization, private security contracting, military interventions and urban policing.

Anthropological research is growing on how the policing of urban violence, crime and disorders takes place in cities, but often is not informed by research on cities. Consequently, the city is approached as a backdrop of policing, rather than an explicit object of reflection and analysis. We will discuss a conceptual framework for the ethnography of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of contemporary cities are productive of police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. Drawing on empirical examples from our research in Mozambique, Somalia, Sierra Leone and Denmark we discuss the spatial, relational and temporal aspects that shape dynamics of attempted urban ordering, and how the expansion of national borders into urban environments informs policies of order-making and securitization.