Policing and Political Violence

• DOI: 10.1177/00220027211013083
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Kristine Eck,Courtenay R. Conrad,Charles Crabtree
• Subject Matter: Special Feature Articles

Policing and Political

Violence

Kristine Eck

1

, Courtenay R. Conrad

2

,

and Charles Crabtree

3,4

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 visi ble 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

1

Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Sweden

2

Department of Political Science, University of California, Merced, CA, USA

3

Department of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

4

The Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, Japan

Corresponding Author:

Kristine Eck, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Box 514, 75120 Uppsala,

Sweden.

Email: Kristine.Eck@pcr.uu.se

Journal of Conflict Resolution

ªThe Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027211013083

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Special Feature Article

2021, Vol. 65(10) 1641 –1656

1642 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(10)

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 interna-

tionally, 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 gov-

ernment violence are often (implicitly or explicitly) interested in the police as actors

in contentious politics. For example, police officers play vital roles in the suppres-

sion 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, s pecifically, and political violenc e, 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.

2Journal of Conflict Resolution XX(X)