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Abstract
This dissertation explores the role of international reform efforts in what is generally considered a strictly domestic activity: internal policing. How has global governance, as enacted by states, international organizations (IOs), and private security companies (PSCs), impacted domestic policing norms? To answer this question, the dissertation begins with a theory outlining a three-stage process for the global governance of policing. In the first stage, IOs define and elevate certain policing norms, which I call structuring norms. Next, international bureaucrats articulate reform policies. Finally, practitioners apply these policies on the ground. Between each stage, there is a decoupling between the structuring norms and the actual reform policies and activities. This leads to a dilution of the core normative principles. This decoupling will be more acute for (post)colonial and (post)conflict states due to both the material realities of these contexts and bureaucrats’ biased perceptions of these spaces. The resulting policies prioritize centralization and coercive approaches over structuring norms centering on community and democratic policing. The empirical chapters of the project combine qualitative evidence from interviews, archives, and ethnography to test the theory. The empirics are organized chronologically and follow each stage of the global governance process. Chapter 3 presents descriptive evidence of international structuring norms for policing from 1956 to 2016, as outlined in United Nations (UN) and International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) guidelines. To address norm articulation, Chapter 4 employs archival evidence to explore patterns in three UN policing missions from the 1990s in Namibia, South Africa, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that UN policing components prioritized centralizing and militarizing police to support short-term order maintenance. This prioritization undermined discursive commitments to building more democratic and community-oriented police. The final two chapters address norm application. In Chapter 5, I leverage interview data from bureaucrats working for IOs on police reform. I find that bureaucrats see culture as an impediment to implementing structuring norms, especially in (post)colonial and (post)conflict contexts. Finally, Chapter 6 examines how PSCs apply policing norms, drawing on interviews with private contractors and ethnographic insights from two international policing conferences. Theoretically, private actors face less pressure to conform to international standards. Still, PSC employees inhabit an epistemic community with their IO and state counterparts. As such, PSC norm application follows similar patterns to IO reforms, prioritizing short-term order maintenance at the expense of community engagement. The dissertation makes three primary contributions. First, I bring policing theoretically and empirically into the study of international relations (IR). At the same time, IR helps me to theorize the global governance of domestic policing. Second, I leverage new data sources to explore the global governance of policing, including largely unexploited archival documents on UN policing missions, over 40 interviews with international bureaucrats who specialize in international police reform, and ethnographic evidence from two international policing conferences. Third, my findings demonstrate that both agency and structure matter for patterns of policy decoupling in international policing.