The Trouble with Protection

Abstract

This chapter briefly outlines what the security organisations do in Bali and points to the complexity of problems around how to understand protection. The chapter surveys primordial, instrumentalist, and constructivist schools of thought on collective violence. The older, primordial school of thought starts from modernist ideas about legitimate authority. The widely followed instrumentalist school starts from an inverse correlation between the power of states and the power of gangs and sets out to explain what gangs are and then predict what they will do. The newer constructivist school starts from Foucauldian notions about the discourses or constructions of governance that shape both governors and the governed and focusses on what security groups do rather than what they are. The conclusion argues in favour of avoiding pejorative terms like “gang” in favour of more neutral terms like “security organisation”.