State of Fear

Joshua Barker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and coeditor of Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity and State of Authority: State in Society in Indonesia.

• Illustrations  ixAbbreviations  xiAcknowledgments  xiiiIntroduction: Fear, Policing, and State Power  1Part One: Territoriality1. Ronda: The Neighborhood Watch  332. Neighborhood Fears, Vigilantism, and Street Toughs  56Part Two: Surveillance3. Urban Panopticon  814. Subjects of Surveillance  113Part Three: Articulations5. State of Fear  1396. The Police Precinct  174Conclusion: Panopticism and Prowess in a Postcolonial City  214Glossary  237Notes  245References  277Index  295

“A brilliant and arresting account of governance, vigilantism, criminality, and violence in postcolonial Indonesia, Joshua Barker’s State of Fear brings a penetrating ethnographic look at Indonesia’s police and neighborhood security teams together with a revealing exploration of historical materials from the late colonial period. It will leave readers spellbound with its unflinching look at the blurring of law and violence at the margins of the state.” - Kenneth M. George, author of (Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld) “In this brilliant, informative, and carefully crafted book Joshua Barker shows how policing performs sovereignty and produces it across scales. Policing, he argues, creates its own target and rationale: Territoriality and surveillance both work by mobilizing a state of fear-an affective condition at the heart of a political order in which the threat of violence structures everyday life. State of Fear makes a signal contribution and contains some of the smartest ethnographic writing and analysis anyone in our discipline has ever produced.” - Danilyn Rutherford, President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation