Contested municipal policing in Ukraine since 2014

• In Event: Police under shocks. Studying police systems in crisis comparatively.

Abstract

The paper examines debates on police decentralization in Ukraine since 2014, when Russia first attacked Ukraine and seized portions of its territory following the ouster of the Yanukovych dictatorship, with attention to the period since February 2022, when the current full-scale invasion began. Although Ukraine’s constitution vests all public security functions in the central government and does not provide for any form of local policing authority, recent years have seen more and more municipalities creating their own de facto local police forces, known as ‘municipal guards.’ There is considerable variation in the duties and composition of these forces, which have sprung up without any formal recognition from the central government. The paper analyzes this variation and also considers how the experiences of war and democratic transition have contributed to bring debates about policing decentralization onto the political agenda in Ukraine, in contrast to nearly all its neighbours in the post-Soviet region, with the goal of shedding light on the forces that stimulate and impede such decentralization more generally.

Author

• Matthew Light, University of Toronto