Policing remains one of the most controversial areas of criminal justice. Recent years have seen major changes in every aspect of policing: new constructions of the police mission, new ways of delivering police services and new arrangements for police accountability. The police have had to respond to international terrorism, international organized crime, the new faces of migration and asylum, globalization and the reconstitution of societies in the post-Communist and Islamic world. This completely revised second edition argues that through these changes enduring and fundamental divisions can be traced. The book is relevant to those studying criminology, police studies, sociology, social policy and law, wherever their interests touch on the police.

Volume two in a series which provides reports on areas of British life conventionally conceived to be conflict-laden, assessing the scale and character of the conflict in those areas. The series aims to consider new or little-heeded evidence, balancing the claims of different commentators and placing such conflict in its historical and social contest, allowing intelligent judgements to be made. It provides prognoses about the likely development of that conflict and ascertain what measures have been taken to manage it and what success they have had, drawing on international experience where helpful.

This paper tests models of coercive social control that are theoretically grounded in general group conflict theory and specific minority threat hypotheses. These theories assert that higher levels of minority presence and overall economic inequality will predict higher levels of social control even when other environmental factors (including crime rates) are held constant. The use of pooled time series cross-sectional data allows for the first longitudinal analysis of police homicides as a social control outcome, which produces mixed findings on racial and economic threats. As in previous research, purely economic conflict predictions find little support while racial threat hypotheses are at least partially substantiated. As part of this same analysis, police homicides and police force size are compared based on their empirical and theoretical strengths as social control outcome variables. This ultimately raises important challenges to the continued use of the police homicide variable in future conflict and minority threat research.

How and why does order emerge after conflict? What does it mean in the context of the twenty-first century post-colonial city? From Kabul, Kigali and Kinshasa to Baghdad and Basra, people, abandoned by the state, make their own rules.With security increasingly ghettoised, survival becomes a matter of manipulation and hustling. In this book, Alice Hills discusses the interface between order and security. While analysts and donors emphasise security, Hills argues that order is much more meaningful for people’s lives. Focusing on the police as both providers of order and a measure of its success, the book shows that order depends more on what has gone before than on reconstruction efforts and that tension is inevitable as donors attempt to reform brutal local policing. Policing Post-Conflict Cities provides a powerful critique of the failure of liberal orthodoxy to understand the meaning of order.