Counterinsurgency Policing the British Way: Border Controls and the Global Making of Policing

• In Event: Global Webs of Counterinsurgency Policing

Abstract

Historically, the UK has played a central role in exporting security around the world, particularly across its colonial domains. As scholars of imperial policing have documented, the making of policing in the British colonial world was strongly underpinned and oriented to supress opposition and resistance to British rulers, and to maintain colonial political order. They argued that the emphasis on counterinsurgency in colonial Britain sharply contrasted with the policing model established in metropolitan Britain, underscored by the Peel’s principles of police independence and policing by consent. In this paper, I question this sharp distinction between the two models arguing that not only counterinsurgency has been a core dimension of British policing during much of the 20th century, but under contemporary conditions, where matters of internal and external security have become blurred due to the rise of the ‘new threat’ doctrine (migration, organized crime and terrorism), such distinction is becoming untenable. Drawing on archival material on the Special Branch and on ethnographic data on police and immigration enforcement, I focus here on an underexplored aspect of policing (border policing) showing its ‘exceptional’ character within the broader domestic police architecture and its significance in the contemporary global making of policing.

Author

• Ana Aliverti, University of Warwick