State of Fear

“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

"Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the neighborhoods and police stations of Bandung, Barker juxtaposes two kinds of order. One is formal, defined by the law that the police claim to enforce, bureaucratic rules, and modern techniques of surveillance. The other is informal, arising from civil society... frequently through violence. These two forms of order often work at cross purposes, but they can also support each other. This fascinating study of how policing works in Indonesia and how it has transformed over time offers a grim reminder: the law does not create its own order." - Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Foreign Affairs

"Barker’s State of Fear is a key contribution to scholarship on security, surveillance and policing in postcolonial Indonesia. His ethnographic and historical analysis provides a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms of power and control shaping daily life. The book is essential reading for scholars of anthropology, criminology and South East Asian studies, offering critical insights into the intersections of state authority, local governance and the ever-present spectre of fear in Indonesia." - Sharyn Graham Davies, South East Asia Research