The origins of policing institutions
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Kristine Eck |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343317747955 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Regular Articles
The origins of policing institutions:
Legacies of colonial insurgency
Kristine Eck
Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University
Abstract
This article examines the impact of colonial-era armed conflict on contemporary institutions. It argues that when
British colonial administrators were faced with armed insurrection they responded with institutional reform of the
police, and that the legacy of these reforms lives on today. Violent opposition prompted the British colonial
administration to expand entrance opportunities for local inhabitants in order to collect intelligence needed to
prosecute a counterinsurgency campaign. This investment in human capital and institutional reform remained when
the colonial power departed; as a result, countries which experienced colonial-era conflict have more efficient policing
structures today. I demonstrate how this worked in practice during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60. Archival data
from Malaysia show that local inhabitants were recruited into the police force in greater numbers and were provided
with training which they would not have received had there been no insurgency. This process was consolidated and
reproduced upon independence in path-dependent ways. To expand the empirical domain, I statistically explore new
archival data collected from the UK National Archives on police financing across colonial territories. The results show
that armed insurgency during the colonial era is associated with higher percentages of police expenditure during the
colonial era and higher perceived levels of contemporary policing capacity.
Keywords
armed conflict, colonialism, policing
This article seeks to understand the variation in contem-
porary policing structures in states which once were Brit-
ish colonial territories, focusing on the experience of
armed conflict during the period of colonial occupation.
It is traditionally thought that both colonialism and
armed conflict have adverse consequences for post-
colonial states in the form of weakened institutions and
other negative externalities. This article shows that when
colonial powers faced armed insurrection they responded
with security inputs, the legacy of which lives on in the
form of human capital and effectivized policing practices.
Studying the legacy of colonial-era conflict on con-
temporary policing institutions speaks to a growing body
of literature on the historical origins of political institu-
tions and the consequences of conflict for their trajec-
tories (Keith & Ogundele, 2007; Pierskalla, De Juan &
Montgomery, forthcoming; Wantchekon & Garcı
´a-
Ponce, 2014; Wucherpfennig, Hunziker & Cederman,
2016). While this article focuses on the colonial period,
scholars have also demonstrated that the pre-colonial era
(Acemoglu, Reed & Robinson, 2014; Wig, 2016; Wim-
mer, 2016) and the immediate post-independence era
(Slater, 2010) impact on institutional patterns. This lit-
erature is united by the claim that historical events mat-
ter and that they exert path-dependent effects on
institutions.
Answering this question also speaks to contemporary
policing practices. Recent debates about police brutality
have propelled this issue onto the center stage of social
science research. There are many dimensions to quality
of policing; I focus here on efficiency, particularly with
regards to intelligence-gathering and preventive capacity.
States with such capacity can wield it to different ends: it
can be used for tasks like infiltrating crime syndicates or
Corresponding author:
kristine.eck@pcr.uu.se
Journal of Peace Research
2018, Vol. 55(2) 147–160
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343317747955
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