Book excerpt: How and why does order emerge after conflict? What does it mean in the context of the twenty-first century post-colonial city? From Kabul, Kigali and Kinshasa to Baghdad and Basra, people, abandoned by the state, make their own rules.With security increasingly ghettoised, survival becomes a matter of manipulation and hustling. In this book, Alice Hills discusses the interface between order and security. While analysts and donors emphasise security, Hills argues that order is much more meaningful for people’s lives. Focusing on the police as both providers of order and a measure of its success, the book shows that order depends more on what has gone before than on reconstruction efforts and that tension is inevitable as donors attempt to reform brutal local policing. Policing Post-Conflict Cities provides a powerful critique of the failure of liberal orthodoxy to understand the meaning of order.