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This chapter discusses the second phase of UN involvement in Iraq, which seemed to herald the emergence of the Security Council as a New World Order Policeman. The Security Council’s capacity to legitimize the use of force provided a legal basis for international action to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. The chapter recounts the diplomatic and military success of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm — mandated to compel the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait and conducted by a coalition of states — drawing legitimacy from Security Council decisions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Chapter VII also provided a newly assertive basis for traditional activities, such as ceasefire implementation and border-monitoring tasks, the Council gave to a new mission, UNIKOM, deployed along the border between Iraq and Kuwait. This new police role for UN peace operations was part of a larger ‘New World Order’ heralded by President George H. W. Bush, which seemed to hold the promise of an international rule of law, enforced by a united P-5 operating through the Security Council.

This introductory chapter explains the theme and coverage of this book, which is about the role of policemen in Brazil as violence workers, torturers, and murderers, and explores how men from Brazil's two main police forces describe their careers, explain police behavior, and justify their violence. It investigates how they came to perpetrate atrocity and describes the personal consequences of their complicity with the official program of state-sponsored violence that they may have carried with them all these years.

Most of the police in Heinrich Himmler's Security Service empire came from the professional police of pre-Nazi Germany. Even though many joined the Nazi Movement, and even became Security Service-Sicherheitsdienst (SS-SD) members, the vast majority identified themselves primarily as policemen. Toward an analysis of these men, one should evaluate and apply as appropriate the sociopsychological theories that have developed from the study of modern police. When applied to the German experience between 1918 and 1945, some of these theories provide likely explanations for police behavior in the Weimar and Nazi eras. The body of theory in question developed largely from research on American police and then expanded, with appropriate modifications, to other societies within the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. Although many German and Austrian sociologists have few qualms about applying much of this theory to their own contemporary police, applying it to Weimar Republic police requires caution.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to study the development and origin of soldier-policemen who have been ignored in the gendarme. It describes Gendarmerie as the most efficient way to maintain the peace in Europe because it provides a surveillance half civil, half military, spread across the whole territory.

Britain’s wars of decolonisation were conducted against the backdrop of the Cold War, and officials and ministers were beset by the supposed communist threat to their empire. In reality most of their opponents were motivated by radical nationalism, not communism. Convinced of the moral righteousness of their imperial mission, they condemned those who opposed them as ‘bandits’, thugs, and gangsters’, and readily cracked down on them. On the ground members of the security forces took a more nuanced view. Some hated their enemies and demanded harsh measures against them, some respected them for fighting for a cause, most simply got on with the job they had been given.

This chapter lays out the strategies for locating and interviewing the Brazilian policemen who had carried out state-sponsored atrocities, discussing the scope and characteristics of the study sample, along with the methodological challenges associated with studying police in general and police atrocity perpetrators in particular. It describes the violence worker demographics and explains the interview procedures with the imprisoned subjects, also discussing the strategy for making the interviewees admit their involvement in violence work.

This chapter examines the interaction among secrecy, occupational insularity, organizational fragmentation, and personal isolation that shaped and facilitated serial torture and execution in Brazil, looking at the structural and interactional factors which molded relatively ordinary Brazilian police into serial atrocity perpetrators. It investigates the entry of several Brazilian policemen into specialized police organizations, social control units, or informal death squads to determine the actual processes that explain the connection between membership in one of these agencies and the perpetration of regular and systematic atrocities.

This chapter takes a look at Brian O'Nolan, who was also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen in the literary world, introducing each of O'Nolan's literary personas, from the novelist and short-story writer (O'Brien), to the author of the funniest newspaper feature (na Gopaleen). From there the discussion focuses his two main novels, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. It notes that At Swim-Two-Birds was written through the second half of the 1930s and that it follows from the early writings of that decade. The Third Policeman, on the other hand, has lesser elements than the other novels, but is considered as more concentrated and serious.

This chapter focuses on Naunakhte's second husband, Khaemnun, a workman in Deir al-Medina. It is not clear when Khaemnun was born. There is some speculation that he was already active as a workman at the end of Dynasty 19, and more specifically in year 4 of either Amunmessu (1199 BCE), Sethy II (1196 BCE), or Siptah (1190 BCE). The chapter reconstructs some of the kitchen-table discussions between Naunakhte and Khaemnun and considers the claim of the workman Amunemipet that he has a right to Khaemnun's tomb. It also discusses various stories in the village, from Khaemnun's donkey to agriculture in Deir al-Medina, land leases from the Kushite period (Dynasty 25), and the dispute over donkeys between a workman, a water carrier, and the chief of police Sobekhotep. It also looks at the deals that the policemen and their chiefs were always striking with the workmen.

This chapter addresses the hybrid semi-civilian and semi-military institutional setting within which police codes of behavior emerged. On the one hand, police leadership held on tightly to military notions of etiquette, proper appearance, comradeship, and loyalty. This attitude became particularly apparent in police training. Not legal knowledge or administrational skills, but an imposing military habitus and access to lethal force were to provide the foundation for quality policing. On the other hand, being charged with civilian tasks, the policemen of the Landespolizei created a professional culture that increasingly introduced administrational techniques as modes of validation and legitimization. To them, it mattered that the job was done in accordance with an ever growing complex of decrees as well as that it was documented in proper form. In short, policemen were men of guns and paper—they injured and killed people “by the book.” This chapter returns to the significance of honor, demonstrating how the concern for proper appearance and performance was the most decisive factor in the emergence of a Landespolizei organizational culture.

This chapter describes lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of businessmen with connections that came from Warsaw and its suburbs, such as Łódz. It recounts the autumn of 1940 when these men reported by the hundreds to a collection point in the Jewish Council building in order to get a job as ghetto policemen. It also cites one of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto that recalled how it was considered a success to get into the police since there was not much work to do and food rations were given. The chapter mentions a German propaganda film from the spring of 1942, which shows the ghetto policemen differing very little from German soldiers. It looks deeper into the history of the Jewish Order Service, wherein Jewish policemen are portrayed as dutiful German soldiers, German officials, and traitors to their own people.

This chapter reviews the Jewish Order Service formations in the ghettos of the General Government that displayed increasing violence and corruption, which eventually led to their forced participation in the deportations from the ghettos. It looks back at case of Warsaw, wherein the process of the Jewish Order Service's corruption started with its formation in the autumn of 1940. It also discusses the link between the endemic corruption and growing violence of the Jewish Order Service and its actions on the Umschlagplatz. The chapter highlights who was responsible for the role that the Jewish Order Service played in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto. It explains how the policemen ceased to be lawyers, assimilators, or players and became people who had a chance to save themselves and their families at the cost of the lives of others at the Umschlagplatz.

This epilogue places the challenges of landpower examined in this volume into a historical perspective since World War II. It argues that the American use of landpower is both ambivalent and Janus-faced. Ambivalent in that the United States has a militarized interventionist foreign policy but looks to withdraw once the complications of conflict become apparent. Janus-faced in that the United States seeks to use landpower in two opposing roles: as a foreign policy deterrent against other great powers and as a global constabulary. That the United States has neither resolved this dilemma nor overcome this ambivalence has curtailed the possibilities inherent to the use of force and must be taken into account when considering the American use of landpower since 9/11.

This chapter outlines the employment conditions common to uniformed policemen and detectives. It details the special set of compensations that detectives received, other material rewards, job satisfaction, and the attractions as well as pressures of detective work that elevated their status as ‘a class apart in the police’. The chapter also discusses the interaction between this particular kind of policeman and the public.