Book Review: Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi by Zoha Waseem

Abstract

to understanding the dynamics between Sinn Fein, a plethora of dissident groups wedded to violence, nationalist/republican communities and the state. Dissidents characterize the IRA’s peace as the ultimate betrayal—by a treacherous leadership—of physical force republican principles. Ongoing attempts by the security service to recruit informers have been exploited by dissidents to fortify their self-reinforcing belief that nothing has changed. Appropriating the discourse of ‘underground penality’ allows them to also proclaim the right to punish traitors in their midst as well as criminal elements in nationalist communities. Sinn Fein claims that dissident groups are a malignant presence, infiltrated and in effect run by sinister elements within the British securitate. Appeals by Sinn Fein for nationalist/republican communities to actively co-operate with the police are, for dissidents, the final turn of the treacherous screw. These appeals also conflict with anti-informing and anti-police norms that are being generationally renewed within nationalist/republican communities. The realignments resultant from the struggle to control the ‘who is a traitor’ narrative within present day Irish republicanism, are for Dudai, the most headspinning aspects of the ‘war to peace’ transitioning process. Dudai is to be applauded for developing a persuasively structured analytical framework that enables us to understand how the demonization and punishment of informers has served a variety of shifting functions in the Northern Ireland context. This framework, which also contributes to the development of a wider understanding of penality, can also be the basis for researching ‘governing through informers’ in other contexts of prolonged political violence.