Policing a world in motion

Globalization transforms policing into an increasingly transnational practice. Viewed from this perspective, state police are seen to be expanding beyond territorial borders to reach out into an increasingly fluid and interconnected world (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2012). In this chapter I consider what happens when the world, in effect, comes to the police. Rapid social, economic and technological change associated with globalization generates anxieties that create the urge to find new forms of order (Weber & Bowling, 2008). Those whose entry or continuing presence has not been sanctioned under law are readily defined as sources of disorder and become the targets of policing strategies aimed at their exclusion (Stumpf, 2006; Krassman, 2007; Bosworth & Guild, 2008). As state police are the institution most closely aligned with the production of order in the industrialized societies of modernity, it is particularly pertinent to ask what role they are playing in the new modes of ordering associated with globalization.