The Political Economy of Policing in Ghana, 1830-2005

This book is a testament to the importance of historical institutional analysis for understanding the reform of Africa’s institutions. As an entry point, Raymond Atuguba examines the regulations of public order and alcohol by the police in Ghana, outlining an interplay of changing ideological and interest formations on the one hand and changing institutional forms on the other. The study reveals not only new forms of oppressive institutional orderings that descend from colonialism; but also new institutional forms that produce possibilities and countervailing technologies of power, capable of meeting and assailing the ways in which the power of post-modern colonialism mobilizes itself.

In sum, this book explores the themes of institutional continuities, hegemonic practices, and institutional reform. It discusses how the British political, economic and legal infrastructure penetrated and disrupted pre-existing regulation of public order and alcohol that was conducive to a particular political economy and various social practices. It emphasizes the enduring character of the new institutions created around public order and alcohol, and how they crystallized at independence and were perpetuated in the post-independence era.

Raymond Atuguba is Professor of General Jurisprudence and currently Dean at the University of Ghana School of Law, where he has taught since 2002. He has been a Visiting Professor of Law and the Henry J. Steiner Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Harvard Law School (2018-2019) and a Bok Visiting International Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (Spring 2024). He has also been James Souverine Gallo Memorial Fellow at Harvard University; Jennifer Oppenheimer Fellow at Harvard University; Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Additionally, he has been a visiting Professor at Ku Leuven University in Belgium, Sciences Po University in Paris, France, and at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.