Jeffrey T. Martin

Jeffrey T. Martin in interested in how plural societies hold themselves together. He uses cultural anthropology to challenge conventional ideas about the “rule of law,” by showing that the institutions of modern policing operate not simply as an instrument of order but, rather, as a complex division of labor within the condition we call “democracy” (in which people manage to disagree while nonetheless preserving a common world). He developed this argument through long-term ethnographic and historical research comparing Taiwan, Hong Kong, the People's Republic of China, and Central Illinois. His first book Sentiment, Reason, and Law: Policing in the Republic of China on Taiwan (Cornell University Press, 2019) documented how Taiwanese police navigated the island’s democratic transition by reconciling the increasing demands for formal legality with an enduring layer of affectively structured relational obligations. He has authored several overviews of social science research on policing, including the Annual Review of Anthropology's survey of police and policing, and chapters in various handbooks of anthropology, criminology, Asian studies, and urban studies. His current project, The Political Organization of Epistemic Life in Grey Zone Taiwan, extends his research into the domain of contested knowledge, asking what epistemic security means under conditions of cognitive warfare. He is presently Director of Graduate Studies in Anthropology, co-convenor of a seminar on the history of anthropology, and was a fellow with the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism in Spring 2026.