Good day today: 4 hours writing, 2 hours reading.
(Thanks to my friend Becca Jewell for the suggestion of leading with the facts, like Bridget Jones in her Diary.)
Writing-wise, I continued to flesh out my outline, completing a pass through the second chapter. To steal an image, it's like ironing a shirt: you go over the same area again and again, each time moving a little further along.
Reading-wise, I caught up on Colombian news regarding peace negotiations with the guerrillas and paramilitaries - there seem to be some concrete advances, I'm surprised - and a scandal involving unauthorized wiretaps by the National Police. (Hmm, sounds familiar.) One of the distinctive things about the U.S. relative to other countries, particularly in Latin America, is the absence of an institution like the National Police. There are entities that have police powers and operate at a national level, like the FBI, but there's not an exact analog. I will need to deal with this difference and what it means at some point - but not today!
I also read an interesting newsletter from FLACSO Ecuador about citizen security. It was helpful for situating my research in current debates about the role of the police in providing public order.
That's it for today - it went well!
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3 comments:
That is more like it. Gold star!
And thanks for bringing that up--I don't know if it's out of bounds here to actually ask about the content of the damned thing, but in reviewing your PowerPoint (as far as *I*'ll ever get), I wondered why national police would be an institution in Latin America but not in the U.S. (?)
Like the ironing analogy. Very apt.
Hooray!
Please do ask away about the content. The short answer about national police is that Latin American countries imported models of policing from continental Europe, which featured national police, whereas the US - to the extent I know about its police history - built on more of an English model, which is much more decentralized. In the case of Colombia, it imported its police system from France, which has a "civilist" tradition of having the police separate from the army. They even brought in a retired French police captain to be the first head of the Colombian National Police. One of his descendants, who still bears the last name Gilibert, was head of the National Police not so long ago, and wrote a book about the early history of the institution.
Cross-national differences in police systems is actually one of the issues looming on the horizon for later this month and July; the chapter I still need to outline is the one on "Colombia in comparative context," where I talk about how my case study relates to and speaks to other countries' experiences. For that, I'll need to be able to speak to police systems in Latin America more broadly. Which is handy, since I'm presenting a paper on that very topic at the Latin American Studies Association conference in September, and the paper's due August 1!
Thanks. Makes sense, begs additional questions, but we'll leave those for a time when you're not supposed to be focusing on something else.
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