This course examines policing in a broad social and cultural perspective. Our focus is the concept of the “police function”: under what sorts of historical and socio-cultural conditions does the idea of the police function make sense? With this question as our guide, we will examine the maintenance of order in stateless societies, look at various historical moments in the emergence of police as an element of modern government, and finally take a survey of the novel policing formations emerging from the processes of decolonization, globalization and neo-liberalism.