Policing and Political Violence

Abstract

The police are often key actors in conflict processes, yet there is little research on their role in the production of political violence. Previous research provides us with a limited understanding of the part the police play in preventing or mitigating the onset or escalation of conflict, in patterns of repression and resistance during conflict, and in the durability of peace after conflicts are resolved. By unpacking the role of state security actors and asking how the state assigns tasks among them—as well as the consequences of these decisions—we generate new research paths for scholars of conflict and policing. We review existing research in the field, highlighting recent findings, including those from the articles in this special issue. We conclude by arguing that the fields of policing and conflict research have much to gain from each other and by discussing future directions for policing research in conflict studies.

Keywords

political violence police policing conflict

Police officers are arguably the most visible representatives of government that regularly interact with the public.¹ In the United States, for example, one in five adults report having had an encounter with police every year (Eith and Durose 2011); in Belgium, Finland, and Sweden, one in two citizens is approached, stopped, or contacted by domestic security forces every two years (Staubli 2017). Although similar statistics for other countries—particularly autocracies or conflict-affected countries—are less readily available, we can imagine that police-citizen interactions occur just as frequently, and perhaps even more often. This means that millions of people across the world regularly cross paths with the coercive arms of their governments.

Given the core constitutive role the police serve in the functioning of the state (e.g., Soss and Weaver 2017), the frequency of citizen-police interactions, and the fact that those interactions often occur in the context of or result in violence, one might expect research on policing to be commonplace in political science. But the politics of policing has received relatively little attention from political scientists to date (Mummolo 2018b; Soss and Weaver 2016). For example, only about 40 articles per year have been published on policing in political science from 1980 to 2017 (Crabtree 2019), and over 50 percent of these articles have focused on the United States.

Although almost all contemporary descriptions of the state acknowledge that its sine qua non is its reliance on coercion and the use of violence,² what research there is on policing typically fails to consider policing in the context of violence—both the extent to which conflict dynamics influence police behavior and the extent to which institutions (fail to) constrain police violence. The use and misuse of government violence against citizens has drawn public scrutiny, both domestically and internationally, from scholars and policymakers alike. Over the last several years, there has been increasing public concern that domestic security forces around the world violate citizens’ human rights (Pitts and Krupanski 2013), yet we know little about how these practices intersect with the production of political violence.

While police scholars have largely avoided generating and testing theories of violence, scholars of political violence have also only begun to theorize about the police. This oversight is perhaps even more surprising because the study of political violence is in many cases the study of police actions; researchers who study government violence are often (implicitly or explicitly) interested in the police as actors in contentious politics. For example, police officers play vital roles in the suppression or protection of human rights by the government, and they are also often key actors in domestic and international conflict prevention, escalation, and resolution.

Because the literatures on policing, specifically, and political violence, more generally, have developed separately from one another—often confined to different subfields, or even disciplines, as well as different geographic contexts—we lack a common conceptual language and theoretical framework for understanding policing in the context of political violence. The study of policing in relation to political violence is in its infancy, with considerable scope for theoretical, empirical, and methodological development that can help us better understand police behavior and constraint, contentious politics, and the intersection of the two previously siloed fields.

The articles in this special issue develop our understanding of the link between law enforcement officials and political violence in the context of armed conflict. The contributions are substantively diverse; some articles explore the effects of police behavior—violence, reform, and organization—on public perceptions of the police (e.g., Blair and Morse, Curtice), while others test hypotheses about the causes of police violence (e.g., Arriola et al., Sullivan and Liu). The articles examine policing across polities, with some exploring policing in democratizing regimes (e.g., Blair and Morse) and others investigating policing in democratized regimes (e.g., Curtice, Sullivan and Liu). As a set, they inspect both the causes and effects of police behavior before and during conflict (e.g., Arriola et al.; Sullivan and Liu,) and in post-conflict settings (e.g., Curtice; Blair and Morse). In these investigations, the articles leverage a wide-range of methods and empirical approaches. Some employ observational research designs (e.g., Arriola et al.), while others use natural experiments or survey experiments (e.g., Blair and Morse; Curtice; Sullivan and Liu).

This collection of articles highlights how integrating research on policing within conflict studies can enrich our understanding of political violence. We think that this can happen both because conflict scholars bring new perspectives to the literature and because the study of policing is something that conflict scholars should themselves take more seriously. In what follows, we first provide an overview of the nascent, but growing, research field on policing in political violence as well as the contributions in this special issue. We then argue that conflict scholars should more explicitly generate theories about the police rather than theorizing about aggregate government actors. Finally, in the last section of the paper, we discuss future directions for policing research as it relates to the study of contentious politics.

What We Know about Policing in Conflict Studies

To date, much of the research on policing been developed in the context of Western consolidated democracies (Crabtree 2018). Conflict scholars are well-poised to modify extant theories created to explain phenomena in these cases—and generate new ones—about police behavior and the extent to which institutions can constrain it. One exciting area of research explores how historical and contextual experiences with violence impact public opinion of the police and the development of policing institutions and strategies. For example, Jonathan-Zamir and Weisburd (2013) show that security threats in Israel lead to higher public perceptions of police legitimacy. Deglow (2016) finds that the conflict violence in Northern Ireland is correlated with higher levels of post-conflict crime; she argues that this is due to an erosion of police legitimacy. Eck (2018a), in contrast, finds that earlier experiences with colonial-era insurgency can result in increased policing capacity after independence.

Researchers have also begun to probe individual-level dimensions of policing in conflict contexts, considering both the identity of those recruited and how the state can use police officer behavior to ensure loyalty to the regime. For instance, Hassan (2017) and Hassan and O’Mealia (2018) show how the Kenyan state manipulated the appointment and promotion of police officers to minimize delegation loss and increase alignment with the incumbent in the context of elections and electoral violence. Relatedly, Nanes (2020) argues that citizen fears of police repression can be decreased by ensuring that police units contain officers from a mixture of ethnic groups.

In addition to investigating the individual-level dynamics of conflict policing, recent work also examines the dyadic dynamics of the police-challenger relationship. Leveraging original archival data, Davenport (2015) and Sullivan (2016a, 2016b) show how repressive policing strategies influence challenger adaptation, as well as the consequences of the repression-dissent nexus for violence. Ong (2018) extends this work by examining what drives the state to use either the police or “thugs for hire” for repressive acts, finding that the Chinese government delegates security functions to private actors when it wants to avoid official responsibility.

The third article in this special issue highlights how the theoretical perspectives of conflict scholars can extend existing research on the influence of police on public behavior. In “How Repression Affects Public Perceptions of Police: Evidence from Uganda,” Travis Curtice argues that police in Uganda are tasked not only with maintaining law and order—which requires cooperation from the public—but also with suppressing dissent, and he shows that this tension shapes citizen-state interactions. He contends that fear of repression—something that is arguably much more salient in a non-democratic context—affects the public’s trust in police. Using data from face-to-face interviews and a natural experiment, he demonstrates that repression negatively influences individuals’ perceptions of the police, thereby decreasing their willingness to cooperate. By explicitly integrating his arguments with the literature on state repression and opposition dissent, Curtice highlights how scholarship on political violence can generate fresh insights for scholars of police behavior of relevance even to non-conflict scholars.

This is but one example of how conflict scholars can provide theoretical insights into police behavior. In the last thirty years, for example, there has been a significant increase in the powers granted to the police and other law enforcement officials across the globe. Even in democracies, police are increasingly militarized (e.g., Flores-Macias and Zarkin 2019; Mummolo 2018a) and tasked with combating organized crime, investigating corruption, and preventing and responding to terrorist activity (e.g., Franco, Magaloni, and Melo 2020; Lawson 2019; Osorio 2019). To our knowledge, there is little existing research on the causes and implications of this broader policing remit in political science, which can be important for understanding how militarization may propel political violence. Existing theories of policing will need to be modified if we are to understand how shifting from law-and-order public service models of policing to preemptive, surveillance-oriented—and often more contentious—forms of policing influence citizen-state relations. Such tensions have long existed in repressive countries and insights from conflict scholars can further our understanding of the contexts in which these developments occur as well as when they risk triggering conflict escalation and increasing violence.

The first article in this special issue helps illustrate how conflict scholars can theoretically incorporate the importance of context in studying the police. In “Policing and the Legacies of Wartime State Predation: Evidence from a Survey and Field Experiment in Liberia,” Robert A. Blair and Benjamin S. Morse investigate how violence exposure during civil war shapes civilians’ attitudes toward post-conflict police forces. Existing research on this question comes to conflicting answers regarding how exposure influences public attitudes. Some research argues that exposure decreases public trust in the government (De Juan and Pierskalla 2016; Voors and Bulte 2014; Hutchison and Johnson 2011), while other work suggests that it increases expressions of trust in elected officials, such as the president (Bakke et al. 2013) or local councilors (Sacks and Larizza 2012). Using novel survey data from Liberia, Blair and Morse show that wartime violence is associated with stronger rather than weaker demand for the police, especially relative to alternative non-state providers of security. Related to our point about context above, they add considerable nuance to their findings by showing that this correlation is conditional on an important moderator—prior victimization by rebel groups. For the victimized subgroup within their sample, demand for the police is substantially higher. By providing evidence that public demand for policing is conditional on prior exposure to violence, Blair and Morse highlight the potential importance of contextual moderators in explaining public perceptions of the police.

In addition to shedding light on the theoretical drivers of police behavior, the conflict literature illustrates how the study of policing can be enhanced by using different research designs and data sources. For example, much of the existing literature on policing uses contemporaneous data from public records or surveys (e.g., Mummolo 2018a, 2018b). In comparison, a significant line of conflict research makes use of historical administrative data to test hypotheses about political violence and contentious politics (e.g., Balcells and Sullivan 2018; Davenport 2015; Kalyvas 2006; Wilkinson 2006). These data—and other historical administrative data—could be additionally useful in testing hypotheses about police behavior and restraint. Their usefulness might be even greater when it comes to studying the police, since data on policing is relatively scarce.

The fourth article in this issue demonstrates the potential usefulness of historical data on extending our understanding of policing. In “And the Heat Goes On: Police Repression and the Modalities of Power,” Howard Liu and Christopher Sullivan analyze the persistence and decline of police violence in the aftermath of civil war. They argue that local infrastructural power allocates resources for police to surveil dissidents and thereby preemptively limits the emergence or escalation of dissent. Using archival data on police repression in Guatemala and leveraging an earthquake-induced shock to policing infrastructure, they find that police repression was more pronounced in municipalities where infrastructure was most damaged by the earthquake. This is because the security apparatus lost the ability to monitor dissent movements and contain emerging threats. Controlling for observed dissident activity, they show that repression becomes less intense as the state’s infrastructural power recovered from the earthquake damage. Liu and Sullivan’s findings call attention to the benefits of historical data in the study of policing, especially when coupled with research designs that permit credible causal inferences.

The conflict literature not only highlights the potential importance of historical data, but also of cross-national data. With few exceptions (e.g., Eck 2018a), the study of policing and political violence is typically limited to single country cases. In line with our discussion above, this focus on individual countries limits the ability of policing scholars to examine potential moderating effects. Conflict research has a rich tradition of collecting data across countries, developing theories that explain this variation, and implementing research designs to test those cross-national theories. There is a general lack of cross-national data available about the police; for example, of the 128 governance variables included in the Quality of Governance dataset, only three are related to policing and none of the 450 indicators in the V-Dem dataset specifically concern the police. This has begun to shift with the release of the Police Reforms in Peace Agreements dataset (Ansorg, Haass, and Strasheim 2016) and the State Security Forces dataset (De Bruin 2021), but major empirical gaps remain.

In “Policing Institutions and Post-Conflict Peace,” the second article in this issue, Leonard R. Arriola, David A. Dow, Aila Matanock, and Michaela Mattes contribute to rectifying this data deficit. They provide an important public good to the research community in the form of new cross-national information on the institutional design of police forces. In doing so, they show how conflict scholars can contribute to the growing research agenda on policing by generating cross-national data that can generate new opportunities for descriptive studies and theoretical development. Arguing that policing has been understudied in a comparative context in part due to a lack of systematic data, Arriola et al. argue that various aspects of institutional design of police forces can impact the onset and dynamics of armed conflict. They then test these theoretical expectations about the effect of police organization on political violence using the Police Force Organization Data (PFOD)—their newly constructed dataset on the institutional organization of police forces in over 100 developing countries from 2000 to 2015. They find evidence that the organization of police forces influences conflict, showing conflict onset to be positively correlated with police fragmentation and violence against civilians to be negatively correlated with police coordination. They also provide empirical evidence that local policing decreases the probability of conflict reemergence.

Why More Conflict Scholars Should Study Policing

For a literature that has long focused on explaining variation in violence at the country-year unit of analysis, scholars of contentious politics are increasingly developing and testing more disaggregated theories of political violence (Balcells and Justino 2014; Cederman and Gleditsch 2009). Initial efforts to do this were motivated by a desire to unpack micro-level conflict dynamics (e.g., Kalyvas 2008; Buhaug and Lujala 2005). Scholars have built on this geographically and temporally disaggregated work by also unboxing the plurality of actors that can be found in the conflict space. These research efforts have examined, among other things, the proliferation of different rebels groups across contested spaces, as well as their internal fractionalization (Bakke, Cunningham, and Seymour 2012; Cunningham, Bakke, and Seymour 2012; Findley and Rudloff 2012; Fjelde and Nilsson 2012), pro-government militias (Carey, Mitchell, and Lowe 2013; Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015; Staniland 2015), transnational agents of violence (Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2013; Avant and Neu 2019; Bakke 2014) and civilians themselves as agents active in mitigating the impact of armed actors (Arjona 2017; Kaplan 2017). Despite this growing research program on individual types of actors, scholars have only begun to challenge the unitary actor assumption regarding the state. Recent work has begun to disaggregate the violent actors of the “state” and its security forces (e.g., Conrad, Haglund, and Moore 2013; Davenport 2015), but much remains to be done in distinguishing between the security actors within a state—armies, paramilitary forces, police—as well as within each of those organizations. Consequently, many important questions remain unanswered, for example, what explains which forces are deployed to combat insurgency at different points in time, and what are the consequences of such choices for conflict dynamics and the post-conflict environment? Just as importantly, why are some units responsible for human rights violations and not others?

Since the extant literature on contentious politics often fails to theoretically and empirically disaggregate government agents, we simply do not know to what extent the police behave differently than other repressive actors and the implications of any such differences. The authors of the Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) dataset note that the police are called out for human rights violations more than any other type of agent of control (Conrad, Haglund, and Moore 2013), but these data have rarely been leveraged to test disaggregated theories of state violence. Similarly, although scholars of contentious politics have theorized about the delegation of violence (e.g., Mitchell 2012), the conditions under which violent state agents are likely to defect (e.g., DeMeritt 2015), and the effects of such desertions (e.g., Chenoweth and Stephan 2011), they have not yet fully investigated potential variation in agency problems across state agents. We do not yet know whether, for example, delegation to the military or the police would better mitigate leaders’ concerns about coup-proofing, whether there are differential patterns of recruitment into state security organs, or whether certain security organs are more suitable for oversight and control in the delegation of political violence.³ In short, we know little about how leaders adjudicate between the use of different agents of control in confronting the opposition, as well as the consequences of those decisions for conflict outcomes, state repression, and dissident activity.

The articles in this special issue all disaggregate the state by focusing on one potentially violent actor—the police. They also disaggregate both temporally (e.g., Curtice) and geographically (e.g., Liu and Sullivan). Taken together, the articles illustrate the power of disaggregation, moving from examining state practices across all agents in one country year, to examining the actions of individual actors in discrete places and times. Other researchers should take note of this and examine the generalizability of these findings, by focusing on other agents in other places at other times.

One might also think of time in terms of temporal stages. The literature on conflict processes suggests that violent government agents behave differently across the various stages of conflict—onset, escalation, and resolution—but fails to specify the extent to which that is true of police, specifically. As the government organization with the primary mandate for domestic security, the police are often the first state responders to interact with the opposition. For example, this was the case in Nepal, where the police fought Communist insurgents for five years before the army was deployed; police repression is often credited with spurring support for the rebels and leading to conflict escalation (Eck 2018b). But the police are not always the first to be deployed. Sometimes the military, a paramilitary body, or another government-aligned informal security provider (e.g., PGMs, warlords) is deployed simultaneously along with the police; sometimes the police have little or no role in counterinsurgency. This variation suggests a myriad of research questions. Who do government leaders trust with security provision in the face of an armed contest, and under what conditions? What are the consequences of those decisions for the escalation of violence, its duration, and its outcome?

Future Directions for Policing Research in Conflict Studies

While the articles in this special issue substantially build on and extend existing research on policing and political violence, we see several directions for future work. One potentially useful area of future research would address how governments adjudicate between different security actors across contexts—and what the consequences of this security agent choice are for both the opposition and the civilian population. In countries not beset by armed conflict, police often have stronger domestic intelligence-gathering capacities as compared to the military, which allows them to infiltrate challenger organizations (Davenport 2015).⁴ This may allow them to use targeted or covert repression, which in turn may (or may not) be more effective in suppressing opposition. At the same time, police forces may come with other disadvantages due to contextual factors—like capacity, resourcing, and composition—which can counterbalance their strengths.

The colonial UK insurgencies provide a compelling example. During the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), the UK tasked the police with leading the counterinsurgency due to their advantages in infiltration and inducing sedition within the opposition (Eck 2018a). The superior intelligence capacity of the police proved an essential component in eventually defeating insurgents. The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which occurred largely during the same time-period (1952–1960), however, was largely a military war (Elkins 2005), with the army taking the lead in combating insurgency. Despite knowing the benefits of police involvement in Malaya, British officials deemed the context in Kenya too different to apply the same strategy. The nature of state repression and human rights violations differed across the contexts as well, arguably at least partially because of these differing counterinsurgency approaches. These lessons learned about the importance of police in counterinsurgency have not been lost on modern great powers: police training is increasingly understood by the US as an essential component of foreign counterinsurgency interventions (Bayley and Perito 2010; Ladwig 2007). More research should examine the how governments adjudicate between different agents of control deployed across different contexts.

A second potentially fruitful area of research would be to examine how police use of violence influences public perceptions of police legitimacy, and the public’s willingness to cooperate with the police (e.g., Ham et al. 2019). “For example, in Latin America, police corruption has been shown to diminish public perceptions of political legitimacy (e.g., Cruz 2015). When Latin American citizens lack confidence in the police, they tend to express more support for the military (e.g., Pion-Berlin and Carreras 2017).” In this issue, Curtice finds that the tension between the law and order task and the task of suppressing dissent resulted in negative externalities in Uganda, in the form of decreased citizen trust in police. In a different context—Israel—researchers have found that countering security threats (in the form of terrorist attacks) resulted in improved police performance in terms of clearing police files on ordinary crime (Weisburd et al. 2010). These different findings suggest a need for further exploring how police involvement in combating opposition influences their task of ensuring law and order throughout society.

A third avenue for future research would be to unpack the role that police play in escalatory and de-escalatory dynamics. In addition to understanding when police are deployed and the consequences of their deployment, researchers also need to consider the division of labor between different security units when there are multiple actors wielding state violence in the conflict space. Who does what in counterinsurgency? When do police take the lead on intelligence collection, for example, and how is that intelligence translated into operations? Perhaps the conditions under which police can take the lead on such operations is—or should be—in part a function of public perceptions of police v. military legitimacy (e.g., Cruz 2015; Pion-Berlin and Carreras 2017). As another example, how does the structure and staffing of police forces impact on the trajectory of violence? In this special issue, Arriola et al., show that heterogeneity in the structure of police forces influences several outcomes of interest to scholars of contentious politics and underscore the need for more research on the influence of police organization on violence.

A fourth area for research would be to incorporate the study of discriminatory practices more explicitly in the context of policing and political violence. Previous work on policing in mostly democratic contexts investigates the extent to which police vary their use of force based on the individual characteristics with whom they interact, coming to heterogeneous conclusions about the extent to which law enforcement agents across the globe exhibit differential treatment against some groups (Sun, Wu, and Hu 2013; Cashmore and McLaughlin 2013; Guild and Bigo 2005). One of the possible reasons for these conflicting findings might be that many of these studies lack credible causal identification strategies (Crabtree 2019). Another potential reason, however, is that these studies fail to account theoretically or empirically for potential moderating effects that might influence police behavior. Conflict scholars, who are experienced at developing and testing theories about how context conditions the occurrence of violence (e.g., Davenport 2007), are well-suited to helping identify and examine the potentially ignored factors that affect police behavior.

More generally, we think that a particularly promising opportunity is to integrate theories of policing developed across geographic and temporal contexts. While existing work has been fruitful for generating theories to explain policing in specific geographic areas and under particularistic conditions, the goal of social science is often to develop parsimonious models that broadly explain political phenomena. To do that in the context of policing, researchers need to draw from and synthesize the theoretical expectations across different subfields and disparate policing literatures. Although the integration of disparate findings is important for myriad areas of inquiry, we think it to be particularly important in the study of policing. As we suggest above, scholars focused policing in democracies all too often ignore conflict, especially the relationship between the police and other coercive institutions and the role of escalatory and deescalatory dynamics. We hope that this introduction and the articles in this volume provide some ideas about how more general theories—particularly drawing from the literature on political violence—might be developed to inform future research on policing.

As researchers pursue these streams of inquiry, they should keep in mind research ethics. Within the last several years, political scientists have revisited how to best protect the rights of human subjects in social science research, particularly in the context of sensitive research regarding violence and trauma.⁵ These disciplinary conversations have not yet directly addressed the subject of policing, but we think that there is a need for that dialogue. For example, in some cases police researchers use (sometimes leaked) administrative data. While institutional review boards (IRBs) might approve the use of observational data, these leaked data differ from much data in how they were collected—often through covert surveillance or force. Because it is not clear what human subjects protections ought to govern such data, scholars in the field must engage in a vigorous, principled discussion about these data and their use.

Ethical scrutiny should also be applied to data on policing generated through field and survey experiments. In the case of field experiments, for example, the discipline needs to decide under what circumstances police security—a key government service—can and should be randomized to draw better social scientific inferences about its effects. Even when such randomization occurs with a local partner organization or government, the randomization or the act of cooperation with potentially violent actors may be unfair to (segments of) the citizenry.⁶ In the context of survey experiments, we can imagine many treatments related to policing and political violence that might instill fear or other unpleasant emotions in subjects. These emotional states might continue even after debriefing and the survey ends. More discussion is clearly needed in political science on the important topic of ethics in the study of policing and political violence. We think the subject has enough disciplinary and real-world importance to warrant a consensus on ethical considerations that does not hinge on variance in IRB expectations and approval.

There are practical implications of these proposed research directions, including for Security Sector Reform (SSR) processes that are taking place in post-conflict states across the globe. What sort of police training is important, and what sort of institutional oversight should be created? How should we understand police recruitment, training and oversight across different contexts? What best practices can we learn from policing scholars working on strong, wealthy democracies and what can conflict scholars bring to the table in terms of theorizing about how those best practices should be modified in unstable and contentious contexts? How do practices of crime prevention intersect with the police’s role in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and how do these practices differ in contexts of protracted insecurity? The policy demand for answers to these questions is acute and increasing.

Policing is clearly a central policy concern because domestic security agents wield coercive power that can be used for good or ill. Partly as a consequence, citizen well-being is influenced by whether their police are seen as security providers or as security threats. But this Special Issue shows that policing is of growing academic concern as well; given the central role the police can play in quelling opposition, scholars need to account for their influence on the production of political violence. By focusing on the police in our theoretical and empirical work, scholars can better understand the production, dynamics and resolution of conflict.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Michael Weintraub and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on previous drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Courtenay R. Conrad

Notes

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