Cultural strategies for militarizing the Italian police, 1947 -1952

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article analyses the employment of words, images and rituals, in the early years of the Italian Republic, to reinforce the militarization of the Public Security Guard (Corpo delle Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza) and to engender public support for hard-line military-type solutions to law-and-order difficulties. Drawing on police literature (especially the magazine of the Public Security Guard, Polizia Moderna), newspapers and cinema newsreels, it analyses police commemorations and celebrations, and representations of these rituals internally and to the wider public. This includes an examination of the employment of religious language and liturgy, which I argue intended to reinforce a warrior mentality among police officers. The article also investigates how the police and the media framed policing activities and the hard-line repressive tactics which the enhanced militarization of the Public Security Guard determined. To aid interpretation of the sources, the article partly draws on recent critical feminist scholarship on the employment of gendered constructions in the process of militarization.