Kyiv, February 2014. CC BY 2.0: Ivan Bandura / Flickr. Some rights reserved.The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries by Erica Marat is an incisive study of post-Soviet police reforms which has implications beyond this particular region. The book reflects the author’s long-standing experience in studying the issues of crime and criminal justice in the post-Soviet world. It exhibits analytical rigour and mastery of empirical details. In this review, I will briefly re-construct Marat’s argument and will offer some constructive criticism mostly focused on problematising some of the main discussions in the book.
Marat proposes to conceptualise the police as “a medium of state-society consensus” (p. 11), where policing is an outcome of the deliberation between state and societal actors over the nature and limits of coercive action. Marat asks what is needed to reform the police in the post-Soviet world and she situates the answer in three variables: an episode of transformative violence; a pre-existing dissent infrastructure; and a consensus-building process (pp. 9-14). These variables are discussed in Chapters Two and Three, where Marat argues that an episode of transformative violence is crucial in mobilising civil society actors, who then demand police reform. However, whether the episode of violence generates reform momentum depends on the pre-existing dissent infrastructure. If civil society actors lack experience and resources then chances are high that the police will just be refurbished without any profound change. This is a two way process: variations in state-level action (deploying coercive power) and society-level activism (strength and depth of civil society networks) define outcomes in policing.
Marat’s argument is well-reasoned and insightful. It also mirrors some propositions made in previous scholarship on “limited access orders” (North, Wallis & Weingast 2009) and “extractive institutions” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013), according to which more inclusive practices and empowering large segments of the population are needed to develop more successful institutions. These terms refer to situations where political elites enjoy privileged control over parts of the economy, each getting some share of the rents. In these kind of systems, public goods are distributed on non-universalitic basis benefiting insiders, friends and allies of the incumbent rulers.
