Twilight policing: private security practices in South Africa

Many studies have emphasized the pluralization of policing and the interactions between security providers. However, such studies generally employ a top-down and structural approach, emphasizing the organizational ties between policing bodies. This article employs an ethnographic approach to security and focuses on localized policing performances that materialize from the interactions between security providers. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Durban, South Africa, this article introduces the concept of twilight policing, which refers to punitive, disciplinary and exclusionary policing practices that simultaneously undermine and support the state, resulting in actions that are neither public nor private, but ‘twilight’. This article calls for a shift from a plural and organizational approach to policing towards a ‘twilight’ and performative one.