... is the title of yet another paper out for discussion. Police assistance continues to be an overlooked part of U.S. and European foreign policy. This paper first of all aims to give a historical overview of the role of police in Western foreign policy. It will start with the role of the police in the colonial empires as a tool to suppress anti-colonial resistance, continue with Cold War police assistance the crucial role it was given in defeating "Communist subversion" , and end with the post Cold War-era, where police training has become an important part of attempts to stabilize so-called failed states.
Theoretically based on concepts of 'police' and 'police assistance' that draw on criminological understandings that define modern police police as a social institution safeguarding a particular (liberal) social order, the paper discusses the Janus-face of police assistance - that is that the export of liberal forms of order and its related coercive institutions might require (policing) practices that usually are regarded as being incompatible with the very type of (liberal) social order they claim to implant or protect.
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