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Rural Law and Justice

Policing Sovereignty: Tribal–State Cooperation in Rural Reservation Borderlands Brieanna Watters*, Brieanna Watters,

Rural sociological scholarship frequently engages questions of inequality and governance, yet law and legal authority remain comparatively under-examined in analyses of rural policing. This paper draws on original qualitative data from a multi-year study of tribal–state policing cooperation in rural reservation and borderland communities in the Upper Midwest. The data include interviews and ethnographic ride-alongs with tribal police officers, state and county law enforcement, municipal officials, and analysis of cross-deputization agreements, service contracts, and related policing documents.

I examine how cooperative policing arrangements are negotiated, justified, and implemented in contexts of jurisdictional fragmentation and chronic resource scarcity. While these agreements are commonly framed by participants as pragmatic solutions to policing rural space, the findings show that they also reorganize legal authority in ways that are uneven and contested. In particular, cooperative arrangements often expand the operational reach of state and county law enforcement while placing limits on the scope and visibility of tribal policing, producing what I describe as conditional recognition of tribal authority. These dynamics shape everyday policing practices and redefine how sovereignty is enacted on the ground in rural places.

By foregrounding law and jurisdiction as active components of rural governance, this paper contributes to rural sociological debates on justice by demonstrating how policing cooperation functions as a site where power, legality, and inequality are negotiated in rural contexts. More broadly, it highlights the importance of attending to legal pluralism and settler colonial histories when analyzing rural institutions and state presence.