ODID's Olly Owen is convening a panel titled 'Blue and Green Lines: Police and Military Institutions in Africa' at the 6th European Conference on African Studies in Paris today.

African states are characterised by a wide array of state security forces. These armed bureaucracies, with a legal and political mandate to use violence to enforce order, represent a broad ensemble of police, militaries and paramilitaries, including autonomous anti-terror forces, gendarmes, state-run militias, regime security units, community police and others.

Across the continent, they share a security landscape with each other, and with non-state security providers, in shifting arrays of competition, collaboration and contestation. They are both used to collectively mobilise wider society and collectively mobilise their own personnel. Militaries, police forces and paramilitaries are prominent in the reshaping of contemporary African public spheres to competing historical and trans-national influences, visions and traditions in policing and military affairs. Yet their everyday practices, formation, sense of identity and production of norms are rarely examined.

Building on recent ethnographic scholarship, the panel will explore deeper into the functioning and symbolic dimensions of police and military institutions across the continent.

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