Jeff Martin's book is a very welcome volume in Cornell's ground-breaking Police/Worlds series on security, crime and governance, and this book offers the kind of sustained intellectual analysis of police that I wish I had been able to read as a neophyte comparative criminological researcher prior to visiting Taiwan nearly 20 years ago. For the particular readership of this journal it may be worth noting that the Cornell series seeks to highlight ethnographic scholarship that illuminates the contemporary practices and contexts of policing across the world, with books in the series underscoring the broad reach of policing, while also highlighting how it produces a distinct art of governance. Martin, an anthropologist, researches in the study of modern policing, and has conducted research in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

This important book is founded on an ethnographic participant-observation study in a neighbourhood police station (paichusuo) in northern Taiwan, roughly during the first term of the Chen Shui-bian's administration in Taiwan (2000–04). While police patrol is the staple background to US-based police studies, the paichusuo is the institutional backbone of Taiwanese policing. In keeping with the anthropological shift away from earlier Western police scholarship oriented through the “liberal imaginary” with its ideals of the nature of the human subject, legal sovereignty and purpose(s) of the modern state, Martin uses his empirical fieldwork to undermine hegemonic characterizations of policing as law enforcement and coercive force. Rather, using Taiwan with its particular historical and cultural conditions as context, the book argues for an alternative imagining of police as other than the “blade” to the state's knife. In particular, Martin focuses on an apparent paradox, in which the strength of Taiwan's democracy is correlated to the weakness of its police powers. He explains this paradox through a theory of “jurisdictional pluralism,” drawing on the work of Andrew Abbott on the one hand, and Justin Richland on the other.

In Taiwan, he argues, such work is organized by a cultural distinction between sentiment (qing), reason (li) and law (fa) as distinct foundations for political authority. Countless US and British studies of policing have focused on the exercise of police discretion as the intersection of reason and law, yet, in the West, it has remained largely unrelated to any substantial theoretical engagement with “sentiment.” Martin contends that the “illiberal history of Taiwanese policing puts the significance of qing explicitly at the core of the institution. Overt, organized interest by police in qing was institutionalized during the martial law era, through the qingbao (qing-reporting or “intelligence”) system, when police served as an instrument for the cultivation of properly nationalistic political sentiments” (p. 5). His fieldwork findings demonstrate how the politics of sentiment which took shape under KMT rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of Taiwan's democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal “rights” were becoming more significant. By the end of the book, one is completely engaged by Martin's richly embroidered ethnographic portrait as it opens a window on a historically distinctive form of policing, mediating between the sentiment of Taiwan's localized politics and law's central authority. Ultimately, the book convincingly demonstrates how Taiwan's police were project-managers in the construction site of a particular political world.

The book's argument is delineated over six chapters. First, he takes us backstage, elaborating via analysis and anecdote on the means of gaining trust and access to his interlocutors. His depiction of the “honoured guest” trap is instantly recognizable to those of us with experience of “host–guest” visits to Taiwan. In chapter two he seeks to synthesize our historical understanding of the qing of the neighbourhood's policed/policing order in Taiwan, and in particular how Taiwan's political history has shaped the neighbourhood police stations as front-line arenas of political agency, mediation and sites of solidarity and mutualist ethics. Chapters three, four and five flesh out, via thick ethnographic description, how the quotidian work of paichusuo patrol officers constitutes an ethic of repair and care for the problems of living together in a world replete with (in)tolerance, contradiction and disturbance. In the final chapter, such everyday “dirty togetherness” is more deeply contextualized against Taiwan's larger political landscape; here we come to finally apprehend how police power in modern Taiwan operates through the legacy of its authoritarian past, a mode of democratic power based on cultivated citizenship rather than civil rights.

One can always criticize the very best of books by focusing on what is not covered or emphasized – but as a reviewer I resile from that “perk.” Yet, I would have liked to have seen Martin address more fully what is the relation between the theoretical framings that allow us to speak to large questions and the granularity of ethnographic data, which often exceeds these frames?

Arguably, the contemporary challenge for the researcher-scholar is to produce knowledge in such a way that the research enhances us scientifically, ethically, politically and in our general relation to the world. Sentiment, Reason and Law does precisely that, and invites us to consider what concepts, contexts and forms are most pertinent for building a reflective relation to the present. Jeff Martin spent almost a decade living in Taiwan, and this book is a fittingly rich intellectual legacy of his sojourn on that enchanted island. Thought-provoking, analytic, lucid, it also possesses a uniquely anthropological contribution – what one can call, borrowing from Paul Rabinow, “that human thing.” We, whether Taiwan and China specialists or indeed general police scholars alike, are all in his debt.