Didier Fassin – Enforcing Order (2011/2013)

Enforcing Order, written by French anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin, is a dense ethnographic study of everyday policing in the French banlieues. Based on several years of participant observation within an anti-crime brigade (BAC), Fassin reveals how police act as instruments of control and social exclusion in marginalized urban areas. The study is not only a critical contribution to police ethnography but also a reflection on power, state authority, and the relationship between violence and the state.

Research Approach and Context

Enforcing Order is based on participant ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Fassin between 2005 and 2007 in the southern suburbs of Paris. The author embedded himself with a plainclothes special unit, the BAC, over several months and meticulously documented their operations, interactions, and routines. His central question: How is state authority enforced in everyday life—and what are the social implications?

The policing observed took place almost exclusively in neighborhoods marked by poverty, migration, and social marginalization. Here, police do not appear as “protectors” but as a repressive force, whose presence rarely results in safety but often entails humiliation, surveillance, and symbolic violence.

Term: Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC)

Definition: The BAC is a plainclothes special unit of the French police tasked with fighting street crime in urban high-risk areas. Operations typically involve unmarked vehicles and officers in civilian clothing.
Function: Preventive and repressive patrols, targeted identity checks, surveillance, and interventions based on so-called „suspicious behavior.“ The BAC focuses on rapid response and maintaining a strong presence in so-called quartiers sensibles.
Criticism: The BAC has frequently been criticized for its confrontational style, frequent use of force, and racially charged practices. Critics accuse the unit of institutional racism, excessive violence, and creating legally ambiguous operational zones.
Relevance to Fassin: Didier Fassin accompanied a BAC unit ethnographically for several months. In Enforcing Order, he shows how police power, social control, and structural inequality are materially enacted in the unit’s daily practices.

Key Points

Enforcing Order by Didier Fassin

Main Proponent: Didier Fassin

First Published: 2013 (English edition), 2011 (French original)

Country: France

Key Assumptions: PoliceA state institution responsible for maintaining public order, enforcing laws, and preventing crime. reproduce social inequality; violence and control disproportionately target marginalized groups; police action is shaped by symbolic power and institutional routines.

Theoretical Framework: Bourdieu (symbolic violence), Foucault (power, discipline), Wacquant (spatial control), Goffman (police work as performance)

Key Arguments

Fassin’s ethnography illustrates that police work in disadvantaged urban areas is about much more than responding to crime. The BAC’s operations are not primarily about preventing threats or solving cases, but about enforcing a particular social order based on the stigmatization and control of marginalized populations.

First, Fassin shows that police routines are expressions of symbolic domination. Daily practices such as checking, pushing, interrogating, or humiliating young men do not follow a neutral logic of law enforcement. Instead, they represent a specific mode of exercising power that not only reflects social inequality but actively reinforces it. By treating certain groups with constant suspicion, force, and surveillance, police stabilize a social hierarchy in which members of the lower classes—particularly those with a migration background—are constructed as “problem groups.”

Second, Fassin argues that crime itself is not the true focus of policing. What matters is the regulation of presence in public space: who can be where, when, and how. This “regulation of visibility” is informed by entrenched perceptual patterns—for example, young men with dark skin or urban clothing are seen as suspicious regardless of their behavior. PolicingThe practice of maintaining public order and enforcing laws through authorized institutions. thus follows a social map shaped by racialized and class-based assumptions.

Finally, Fassin explores how the police actively produce illegality. The legal order is not applied universally; enforcement is selective. Certain violations are pursued vigorously, others ignored. The focus is systematically placed on specific bodies and neighborhoods: on racialized male youth, impoverished housing blocks, visible difference. Through continuous police presence and punishment of even minor infractions, the BAC contributes to the construction of a “criminalized environment”—fueling a cycle of surveillance, stigmatization, and exclusion.

Theoretical Framework

Fassin draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, especially the concept of symbolic violence and the analysis of the state as a monopoly of physical and symbolic force. He also critiques dominant security discourses that present crime as an objective danger without reflecting on the social roots or effects of policing itself.

Relevance and Reception

Enforcing Order has significantly influenced international policing studies. Its combination of ethnographic method with power theory has been widely received. In German-speaking academia, it has been discussed in relation to Loïc Wacquant’s work on neoliberal penal policy and spatial control in marginalized neighborhoods.

The book also contributes to ongoing debates on institutional racism, racial profiling, and police violence—especially because it centers the perspectives of those policed, who are often marginalized in research.

Related Key Works

• Loïc Wacquant – Punishing the Poor (2009)
• Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish (1975)
• Robert Reiner – The Politics of the Police (2010)
• Jonathan Simon – Governing Through CrimeActs or omissions that violate criminal laws and are punishable by the state. (2007)

Further Thinking: Film Recommendations – Athena (2022) and La Haine (1995)

In addition to Fassin’s ethnographic insights, two films offer a powerful lens on the social realities of French banlieues and their conflictual relations with police:

Trailer for Athena (2022)

Trailer for La Haine (1995)

Both films complement Fassin’s theoretical analysis: while Enforcing Order presents the police’s perspective through ethnography, La Haine and Athena give voice to the affected youth—visually, emotionally, and politically charged.

Conclusion

Didier Fassin’s Enforcing Order is a key work in critical policing studies and contemporary criminology. It demonstrates that police do not merely respond to social problems—they actively shape and reproduce social inequalities. By contrasting the experiences of police officers with those of the policed, Fassin offers a multi-perspective analysis that exposes policing as a social, political, and moral project.