Exporting the UK Policing Brand 1989-2021

Abstract

AbstractUK policing has a vivid and long-lived international history that has ensured it brand resilience since the nineteenth century. What has helped the UK police to succeed internationally and how has the brand adapted to the new post-Cold War era of interventions? This book charts the history of UK international policing; an outward and inward flow of police personnel, skill, and knowledge which became integral to the historic journey of the UK police brand; a complex and dynamic overlapping of styles and activities nested within two broad models—English/civil and Irish/semi-military. Over time, UK policing has acquired a veritable brand value through the global commercialization and commodification of its policing activities in support of British soft power. Since 1989, the growth in international development and a period of post-Cold War interventions brought international policing into sharper focus—this book provides wide-ranging case studies including the Western Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Libya to examine through the use of an extensive collection of police oral histories. Since the 1990s, international policing has become one of the key pillars within international security and development spaces generating the rise in a corporate security industry where demand for UK police retirees grew exponentially. The UK police brand has continued to reshape through the twenty-first century within a post-Brexit Global Britain, as Scotland and Northern Ireland drive forward their own international agendas, and policing and defence engagement enters a period of uncertainty.