Police forces in the Middle East are broadly perceived by the outside world in terms of either their coercive role in repressing and observing the citizenry of states lacking in popular legitimacy, or their corruption and usurpation of judicial powers. While this perception can be justified by regional trends of authoritarianism, it presents a distorted picture of state control. It also fails to address the importance of 'low-policing', where the police rely on varied strategies of power to promote social order, particularly when it comes to problem-solving and policing disputes between citizens. This book studies the development of the civil police in Jordan to demonstrate that even in an illiberal setting, the police can be central to the process of constructing and maintaining hegemonic consent, and that equally, the fracturing of social order is not always signified by police violence. Unlike orthodox criminological appraisals of crime control that render the nature of state power unproblematic, this work contends that the manner in which common grievances and offences are handled by the police is deeply political, defining the state's character and the social order within it. I draw on police science, political theory and legal anthropology to explain how the police have historically used Jordan's oft-touted 'tribal' characteristics to garner consent and reinforce order from below; to consider how these attributes have contributed to regime survival; but also to highlight the police role in upholding competing normative frameworks related to civic participation and neoliberalism which are emerging from a combination of external pressures and domestic threats. The book should have a broad appeal not only to scholars of governance in contemporary Jordan but also to those interested in the resilience of authoritarian rule in the modern Middle East, the intersection of formal and informal normative institutions to regulate common grievances, and indeed to all those who question the assumption that the police - in any society - are first and foremost concerned with preserving the rule of law"--