This article explores the underlying causes of vigilantism, moving beyond existing explanations to propose a novel perspective: state absenteeism. Drawing upon an original dataset collected at the subnational level in Guatemala, the study utilizes police station data as a proxy measure of state presence. This research article sheds light on the intricate dynamics driving vigilantism by analyzing the interplay between state actions, security provision, and the emergence of extralegal justice mechanisms. Empirical findings suggest that existing theories do not fully explain the surge in vigilantism, underscoring the importance of considering state provision of security at the subnational level. This theoretical and empirical contribution highlights the role of uneven state presence in shaping responses to insecurity and calls for more equitable and locally responsive security provision to address the root causes of extralegal justice.

Front-line workers mediate law on the books and law in action, translating higher-level laws into local policy. One important mediating institution is the police. Whereas most research analyzes how the law empowers police to label certain denizens “criminals” – both within and outside criminal legal contexts – this article demonstrates how policing also affects who is recognized as an innocent crime victim. Synthesizing existing scholarship, I theorize three paths through which police can affect legal recognition of crime victims: criminalization, minimization, and legal estrangement. I then test the extent to which these processes affect victims’ access to public benefits provided under victim compensation law. Drawing on never-before-analyzed administrative data from 18 U.S. states (N = 768,382), I find police account for more than half of all victim benefits denials. These denials are racialized and gendered: Police are significantly more likely to criminalize and be estranged from Black male victims and significantly more likely to minimize the injuries of Black female victims. Additional qualitative data suggest police systematically perceive Black men as not truly innocent and Black survivors of gender-based violence as not truly victims. These findings advance our understanding of the expansive role of police in society as well as the porous boundary between social provision and social control.

Calls to defund the police gained prominence with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and take various forms. Depending on what will be defunded, the idea has attracted support from different parts of the political spectrum. The politicized nature of the debate often cuts short reflection on how best to assess proposals to defund the police. This article takes up that task. It begins by developing a typology of defund measures: abolitionist cuts, abolitionist reallocation, disaggregative cuts, and disaggregative reallocation. It then outlines a framework to evaluate policing and defund measures, drawing on criteria from the ethics of defensive force. Since policing relies on force, it faces a high justificatory bar and must satisfy the principles of just aim, proportionality, and necessity. The state should not fund unjustified forms of policing that violate those principles. Different violations, though, demand different policy responses.

There is a lack of knowledge on deaths related to police use of force across Canada. Tracking (In)Justice is a research project that is trying to make sense of the life and death outcomes of policing through developing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and open-source database using publicly available sources. With a collaborative data governance approach, which includes communities most impacted and families of those killed by police, we document and analyze 745 cases of police-involved deaths when intentional force is used across Canada from 2000 to 2023. The data indicate a steady rise in deaths, in particular shooting deaths, as well as that Black and Indigenous people are over-represented. We conclude with reflections on the ethical complexities of datafication, knowledge development of what we call death data and the challenges of enumerating deaths, pitfalls of official sources, the data needs of communities, and the living nature of the Tracking (In)Justice project.

1911 to 1935 was a chaotic, yet foundational, period in the transformation of the police force in Tehran and Iran more broadly. The nationalization of modern Iranian policing can be traced back to this time period. This article explores the role of nationalism and anti-imperialism on policing, how the structure and process of policing underwent transformation, including how police were recruited, trained, and deployed. Localized and decentralized policing was slowly abandoned in favor of an integrated national force, with policing through mediation being replaced with the exercise of power in a top-down and center to periphery manner. Education of police officers also underwent transformation, as new strategies were pursued to create a modern nationalist Iranian police force.

The transformation in the purposes, instruments, and conditions for the deployment of coercion was a central aspect of the modernization of Western European states during the long nineteenth century. Nowhere is this transformation as evident as in the emergence and diffusion of public, specialized, and professional police forces at the time. In this article, we employ automated text analysis to explore legislative debates on policing in the United Kingdom from 1803 to 1945. We identify three distinct periods in which policing was highly salient in Parliament, each of them related to more general processes driving the modernization of the British state. The first period (1830s–1850s) was marked by the institutionalization of modern police forces and their spread across Great Britain. The second period (1880s–1890s) was dominated by Irish MPs denouncing police abuses against their constituents. The third period (1900s–1940s) was characterized by discussions around working conditions for the police in the context of mounting social pressures and war-related police activities. Whereas the first and third periods have attracted much scholarly interest as they culminated in concrete police reforms, the second period has not been as central to historical research on the British police. We show, however, that policing became a major issue in the legislative agenda of the 1880s and 1890s, as it highlighted the tensions within a modernizing British state, torn between the professionalization of domestic police forces under control of local authorities and the persistence of imperial practices in its colonial territories.

This article shows how security forces in Japan in the early 1960s used studies of the violence and unrest that followed the Great Kantō Earthquake as templates for speculation about the challenges they would face in the aftermath of Tokyo's next disastrous earthquake. Both studies reiterated the ambiguities associated with earlier state-sanctioned descriptions of the circumstances surrounding the massacres of Koreans and others in 1923, while maintaining that the Imperial Japanese Army and the police had done all they could to prevent that violence. The Self-Defense Agency and police analysts responsible for the two new studies concluded that if the capital district were to suffer another earthquake disaster like the one in 1923, then it was quite likely that the spread of misinformation – among other factors – would once again lead to outbreaks of vigilante violence and political instability, leaving the police and the SDF with no choice but to respond as their counterparts had forty years earlier.

This article analyses Colombian South–South security cooperation. Drawing upon empirical research findings and by focusing on Colombian security engagements with other Latin American countries in the realm of military transformation, we identify the role of epistemological constructs as key drivers of Colombian South–South security cooperation. We demonstrate that Colombian policy and security actors intentionally created comparability between their own country and its security challenges, and the conditions existing in other countries of the region. This portrayal of idiosyncratic (in)security features as shared attributes across otherwise-different country contexts enables the transfer of security models rooted in Colombia’s expertise and experience. We show how such security-driven homologisation efforts enabled Colombian security practitioners to navigate international hierarchies, particularly unequal US–Colombian relations in their favour, allowing them to secure continued US support and position Colombian security expertise as a blueprint for addressing contemporary security challenges across the region and beyond.