International Policing and International Relations

Abstract

The idea of creating an international police force (IPF) was first mooted by Lord David Davies in the 1930s. In 1963 U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, then claimed that he had ‘no doubt that the world should eventually have an international police force’. Yet our international system has been and continues to be based on states, their sovereignty and a correlative ‘inside/outside’ distinction: a distinction which is resistant to this idea of some form of systematic international policing writ large. Instead of the establishment of an IPF, a new form of international policing has emerged through the unprecedented use of police abroad and the potential consolidation of more specific operational policing norms. This is a phenomenon that may not be as permanent nor as wide ranging as earlier conceptualisations that concerned themselves with a more structured management of interstate behaviour, but, nonetheless, it increases the possibilities for achieving an international order based on the rule of law.