Abstract
Readers expecting a conventional police ethnography may find themselves disoriented by Feldman’s The Gray Zone which is the story of an undercover police investigative team operating in an unnamed city in an unnamed maritime southern European country. The opening chapter, for instance, spends most of its time engaging with theories of sovereignty in anthropology and political philosophy, rather than presenting a more conventional overview of the literature on policing in the social sciences. But readers would do well to remain patient. Feldman’s approach offers a fresh take on the sociopolitical significance of police that avoids the familiar, predictable conceptual framings. He uses his ethnographic engagement to deepen our understanding of this particular investigative team and what it tells us about sovereignty, the state form, and human activity in our current moment.
Feldman observed a seven-member team (six men, one woman) whose members come from different backgrounds but have a shared passion for their work that is matched only by their disdain for desk jobs and bureaucracy. They spend their time on the street investigating international crimes such as human smuggling and trafficking. This involves sophisticated undercover work as well as long, tedious hours conducting surveillance. Feldman worked with a member of the team as part of an earlier project. This relationship afforded him significant access to the team’s daily activities. Feldman went with them as they engaged in the most exciting parts of their work as well as the most mundane, such as eating lunch at one of the many (often illegal) restaurants in the city and goofing around at their office. This makes for a rich ethnography, as does Feldman’s own positionality as a researcher. He is not simply present as an observer, but engages the members of the team as an interlocutor. He challenges them at times and even takes on small roles in some of their operations.
Feldman’s text is conceptually rich. Two concepts ground the text and inform the analysis: sovereignty and the gray zone. Feldman’s understanding of sovereignty rests on a distinction between two sovereign forms. The first sovereign form is that of the nation-state. It involves a vertical arrangement that abstracts subjects into equal but homogenous entities. It is characterized by the “equality before the law” presumed in the rule of law. The second sovereign form involves spaces where people “come to life as particular persons” (p. xvii). It is characterized by a horizontal arrangement in which equality occurs through the mutual recognition of difference. If the first sovereign form figures people as generic subjects, the second empowers them as particular subjects who occupy a unique standpoint relative to others. This is the basis for the ethical judgment particular to the second sovereign form.
The gray zone is not a place but “an effect of human relations” (p. 17). It is a space “where law and custom dissipate and opportunities arise to act without precedent” (p. xvii). The gray zone is inextricably tethered to sovereignty insofar as it is “a point in space-time free of the constraints and contours of moral code and law, which is where sovereign power expresses itself in the original act of (re)constitution” (p. 17). The gray zone is the focus of the text because that is where the investigative team is so often called to operate.
Over the course of the text, Feldman toggles back and forth between ethnographic description and theoretical engagement. The introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument and begins to familiarize the reader with the team and its activities. The next four chapters show how the team moves between the first and second sovereign forms by means of the gray zone. Chapter 1 locates the team within the wider bureaucracy and shows the ways they distance themselves from that bureaucracy through thinking, judgment, and (ethical) action. Chapter 2 continues this analysis by examining how a respect for each team member in their particularity is central to the group’s collective identity. It shows how the principle of honor shapes their (ethical) action by both inspiring team members to do what is necessary on behalf of victims (even if it is not legal) and by placing limits on the kinds of action that can be taken in such situations (such as discouraging the use of excessive violence). Chapter 3 focuses on the team’s relationships with their informants to shed light on a key dimension of undercover work: secrecy. It shows how secrecy is necessary for the state to fulfill its own security needs but also provides an avenue through which the team can operate under its own ethical standards. Chapter 4 discusses the “global gray zone” that provides the venue for interaction between investigative teams and their targets (e.g. clandestine networks that facilitate smuggling, human trafficking, prostitution, and other crimes) beyond the nation-state and its attendant sovereign form. The conclusion provides further philosophical discussion of the concept of the gray zone, arguing for its centrality to action and being in the contemporary world.
I cannot overstate the originality of Feldman’s approach. By avoiding the familiar frameworks that are so often mobilized in police studies (e.g. discretion, corruption, “the Dirty Harry Problem”), The Gray Zone reframes the conversation around sovereignty, policing, ethics, and the law. As a reader, then, I was left wondering what the implications of Feldman’s work were for those more familiar frameworks. For instance, if gray zones are capable of enabling both ethical and unethical action outside the law, how might a recognition of their significance reshape how we think about police and policing in the current political environment? Are the practices of ethically informed extralegal action that Feldman describes particular to the work of this investigative unit? Are we less likely to encounter such ethical nuance among, say, uniformed police charged with order maintenance and patrol? What are the ethical possibilities of honor in other organizational contexts where it seems just as likely to perpetuate police corruption and the “blue wall of silence”? And what more might we say about the ways gender is at work in how police activity is imagined, particularly when figured as an expression of sovereignty itself?
The fact that The Gray Zone left me asking such questions is indicative of the power of Feldman’s work. By avoiding trite depictions and predictable analyses of police activity, Feldman has contributed something truly valuable and unique to our understanding of policing in the contemporary world.