The Dictionary of Human Geography

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structures that shape the geographical imagin-

ations (see alsogeographical imagination)

and tactics of police officers. This work is

largely ethnographic, and emphasizes the

geographical routines through which the

police engage their work (Fyfe, 1992) and

their interest in securing territorial control

(Herbert, 1997; seeterritory). This research

shows that the nature of such territorial

actions by officers is strongly conditioned by

their prior definition of the spaces in which

they are operating. For instance, police con-

struct ‘no-go areas’ (Keith, 1993) or ‘anti-

police areas’ (Herbert, 1997), places where

histories ofconflictwith minorities cause

officers to engage in either avoidance or

heavy-handed tactics.

In recent years, police agencies have

embraced geographical techniques to isolate

and target specific locations of ongoing crim-

inal activity, so-called ‘hot spots’. Through reli-

ance ongeographic information systems,

police departments seek to determine where

crime is perpetuated and to mobilize intensive

enforcement to reduce it. Evidence suggests

that these tactics can be successful in reducing

crime at particular places. However, such oper-

ations are expensive to conduct, and may serve

merely to displace crime to otherlocales.

Other research on policing seeks to situate it

within broaderpowerstructures of thestate

and state–societyrelations. Notable here is

work oncommunitypolicing, a contemporary

reform movement meant to increase co-

operation between officers and citizens.

Observations of community policing in action

demonstrates how officers retain authority in

defining problems and constructing solutions

(Saunders, 1999; Herbert, 2006). Research

also focuses on the blurring of the lines

between military and police in the growth of

the ‘securityforces’.

Analyses of policing outside the specific

context of uniformed agents of coercive state

power largely occur in the context of discus-

sions ofgovernmentality. This refers to the

processes through which individuals and

groups are encouraged to assume responsibil-

ity for their own welfare and control. Such

‘self-help’ actions as creating defensible

spaces, forming neighbourhood watch groups,

and employing private security represent

instances where policing is presumed to

extend beyond the sole province of the state.

This devolution of police authority is often

criticized for exacerbatingclass-based differ-

ences; wealthier individuals and communities

can more easily protect themselves and their

property, and thereby preserve their social

standing. skh

Suggested reading

Fyfe (1992); Herbert (1997).

political ecology An approach to, but far

from a coherenttheoryof, the complex metab-

olism betweennatureandsociety(see Blaikie,

1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987). The

expression itself emerged in the 1970s in a var-

iety of intellectual contexts – employed by the

journalist Alex Cockburn, the anthropologist

Eric Wolf and the environmental scientist

Graheme Beakhurst – as a somewhat inchoate

covering term for the panoply of ways in which

environmental concerns were politicized in the

wake of the environmentalist wave that broke in

the late 1960s and early 1970s (seeenviron-

mental movement). In its academic, and spe-

cifically geographical, usage, political ecology

has a longer and more complex provenance –

whichbothhearkensbacktohumanandcul-

tural ecology, and to an earlier history of rela-

tions between Anthropology andgeographyin

the 1940s and 1950s, and incorporates a more

recent synthetic and analytical deployment in

the early 1980s associated with the work of

Piers Blaikie (1985), Michael Watts (1983a,

1986), and Suzanna Hecht (1985). In the

1990s the core empirical concerns of political

ecology – largely rural, agrarian and third

world– were properly expanded, and the the-

oretical horizons have deepened the original

concerns with the dynamics of resource

management (see Peluso, 1992; Zimmerer,

1997; Neumann, 1999). Political ecology has

also splintered into a more complex field of

political ecologies, which embracesenviron-

mental history (Grove, 1995), science

studies(Demeritt, 1998),actor-network the-

ory(Braun and Castree, 1998),gendertheory

(Agrawal, 1998: cf.feminist geographies;gen-

der;gender and development),discourse

analysis(Escobar, 1995) and a reinvigorated

marxism (O’Connor, 1998; Leff, 1995; cf.

marxist geography).

Two geographical monographs –The polit-

ical economy of soil erosion(1985) by Piers

Blaikie and Land degradation and society

(1987), edited by Harold Brookfield and

Piers Blaikie – provided the intellectual and

theoretical foundation stones for the formal-

ization of political ecology as such. What

Blaikie achieved inThe political economy of soil

erosionwas to systematize the growing conflu-

ence between three theoretical approaches:

cultural ecology (Nietschmann, 1973) in

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POLITICAL ECOLOGY