3 - State Policing, from the Ottoman Gendarmerie to the Public Security Directorate

Summary

This chapter maps the emergence and development of the police as part of the Jordanian state’s institutional infrastructure. Starting with a brief overview of policing in early Muslim societies and policing in Transjordan under the Ottoman Empire, the chapter then focuses on the organisational development of the police (in towns and the countryside) within the Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha and the British Mandate until the separation of the police from the military in 1956 and the creation of the Public Security Directorate (PSD). The discussion of various police roles within the Legion indicates that while coercion featured prominently in the early days of the state, the police were concerned not only with ‘repression’ or ‘law-enforcement’, but also with social ordering. The chapter’s second section highlights and seeks to make sense of a series of seeming paradoxes within the contemporary PSD relating to ideas about it as a civic service or a quasi-military force, as a guardian of conservativism, and/or a heralder of modernity; and as being at once ubiquitous and /or ‘laissez-faire’.