Egalitarian Lives and Violence

Abstract Since independence in 1975, Mozambique has experimented with society-state relations, including an Afro-socialist revolutionary transformation followed by a multi-party democracy nominal state functions, such as policing. Building on fieldwork, this article analyzes the genealogy and practices of community policing, arguing that while its emergence reflects global apparatuses reliant securitization, transition is still progress. Community policing interconnect both (petty organized) crime nominally past experiments citizenship socialist Mozambique, promises egalitarian life linger political cosmology memory. Mozambican thus exhibits core characteristics fluid ‘predatory-protective’ security assemblage, simultaneously harboring potential for instantiating forms beyond hierarchical ordering.