Advocating for Police Reform: Pakistan & Beyond

Can colonial policing be reformed? Zoha Waseem (University of Warwick, Urban Violence Research Network) and Carrie Booth Walling (Human Rights Program, University of Minnesota) investigate the contemporary challenges around police reform and institutional transformation. First diving deep into police institutional culture in Pakistan as it has evolved since British colonial rule, Waseem will explore the roots of counterinsurgency policing and how these tactics connect to ongoing repressive practices against dissidents and critics in the region. The panelists will also consider how postcolonial states have chosen to instill reforms selectively and block progress—maintaining the status quo, empowering the political elite, and limiting space for public accountability—and will highlight the roles civil society actors and political activists play in fostering institutional change.

Image: Activists in Peshawar, Pakistan, October 7, 2016. Credit PPI Images.

The 2024-25 (In)Justice Series on Just Policing presented by the Institute for Advanced Study at the UMN critically examines how policing intersects with broader societal issues across the globe and explores efforts to reform, transform, or abolish policing. Presented in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing.

About the Presenter

Zoha Waseem is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick (Coventry, England) and is co-coordinator for the Urban Violence Research Network (UVRN). She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her interdisciplinary research draws from criminology, law, politics, and sociology, and focuses on policing, security, armed violence, state violence, counterinsurgency, informality, militarism, and migration in Pakistan, South Asia, and beyond. She is also interested in minority and diaspora experiences with policing in the United Kingdom. Waseem has published in Security Dialogue, the Journal of Urban Affairs, Policing and Society, and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, with forthcoming papers in World Development and Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. Her book, Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters, and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (Hurst & Co. and Oxford University Press 2022) is based on her doctoral research. Previously, Waseem was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Global City Policing at the University College London. She completed her PhD from King's College London and holds an MA from KCL and an LLB (Hons) from the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Moderator

Carrie Booth Walling is director of the Human Rights Program at the UMN—a hub of interdisciplinary research, teaching, and community outreach in the field of human rights in the College of Liberal Arts. She is director of graduate studies for the graduate minor in Human Rights, a faculty member in the Institute for Global Studies, and affiliated faculty at the Hubert H. Humphrey School for Public Affairs. Walling specializes in human rights, human security, transitional justice, the United Nations Security Council, and mass atrocity crimes. Her recent book, Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World encourages readers to see the human rights issues in their neighborhoods and equips them to engage in human rights advocacy to promote policy change. Walling is currently a collaborator on “Parental Incarceration and Children's Human Rights,” which holds a 2024-25 Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residency. She is a certified instructor for the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which brings incarcerated and non-incarcerated people together to study justice behind prison walls.

UMN Conversations at Northrop is a collection of lectures, panel discussions, and other conversations focused on important and timely issues presented in collaboration among numerous University of Minnesota departments and held at Northrop.

Related Links

• Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi by Zoha Waseem
• Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World by Carrie Booth Walling
• Urban Violence Research Network
• Human Rights Program, University of Minnesota
• Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing: Transnational Perspectives on the Definition and Possibility of Justice in Law Enforcement 
• IAS Institute for Advanced Study