By Lutterbeck, Derek

This paper describes and explains the evolution of gendarmerie-type forces, i.e. police forces with a military status, over the past three decades. It focuses on their institutional features and functions, including material and human resources, and uses case studies from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa to illustrate these characteristics in different contexts. The overall development of gendarmeries has been a somewhat paradoxical one. On the one hand, most of these forces have witnessed a considerable expansion, and come to assume an increasingly prominent role in addressing many of the currently most important security challenges, ranging from border control and counterterrorism to public order tasks in international peace operations. On the other hand, there has also been a trend towards the demilitarization of gendarmeries, which in some European countries has ultimately led to their dissolution and integration into the civilian police. The paper suggests an explanation of these seemingly contradictory developments with reference to two broad â and at least partly opposing â trends: the convergence of internal and external security agendas, which to a large extent is a post-Cold War phenomenon; and the demilitarization of internal security, which is a more long-term historical trend and part of the more general democratization process. Based on this analysis, the paper predicts that in the long run gendarmeries are likely to be further demilitarized, eventually losing their formal military status, although in the context of international peace operations militarized gendarmerie forces are expected to play an increasingly significant part.

London: Ubiquity Press, 2013. 66p.

By Hannah Doyle.

Terrorism, the use of military force in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and the fatal police shootings of unarmed persons have all contributed to renewed interest in the ethics of police and military use of lethal force and its moral justification. In this book, philosopher Seumas Miller analyzes the various moral justifications and moral responsibilities involved in the use of lethal force by police and military combatants, relying on a distinctive normative teleological account of institutional roles. His conception constitutes a novel alternative to prevailing reductive individualist and collectivist accounts. As Miller argues, police and military uses of lethal force are morally justified in part by recourse to fundamental natural moral rights and obligations, especially the right to personal self-defense and the moral obligation to defend the lives of innocent others. Yet the moral justification for police and military use of lethal force is to some extent role-specific. Both police officers and military combatants evidently have an institutionally-based moral duty to put themselves in harm's way to protect others. Under some circumstances, however, police have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to uphold the law; and military combatants have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to win wars. Two key notions in play are joint action and the natural right to self-defense. Miller uses a relational individualist theory of joint actions to construct the notion of multi-layered structures of joint action in order to explicate organizational action. He also provides a novel theory of justifiable killing in self-defense. Over the course of his book, Miller covers a variety of urgent topics, such as police shootings of armed offenders, police shooting of suicide-bombers, targeted killing, autonomous weapons, humanitarian armed intervention, and civilian immunity. New York: Oxford University Press 2016, 312p.