Description
‘Dialogic Legitimacy’ and Police Development Assistance This paper draws from Bottoms and Tankebe’s work on ‘dialogic legitimacy’ to interpret the legitimacy deficits associated with international police development assistance programmes used to promote ‘democratic policing’ reforms from the bottom-up in weak and structurally dependent states. Retrospective analysis of the author’s ethnographic field work in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2011 highlights legitimacy deficits which existed at three interconnected levels of transnational security governance: the macro-level which accounts for the international community’s influence to shape domestic policy agendas and priorities in Bosnia; the meso-level which accounts for the transnational, institutional environments in which these agendas are translated into policy recommendations; and the micro-level whereby policies are implemented or resisted as practice by local police. The analysis indicates that there is potential value in interpreting these legitimacy deficits as the products of ‘dialogues’ between power holders and their intended audiences but that the complex power relations of these fields makes differentiating between ‘power holder’ and ‘audience’ perspectives rather challenging.| Period | Jul 2014 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Liverpool, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandShow on map |