The Emergence of Rule-Based Security Forces: Lessons from Early Modern State-Building Applied to the Afghan Local Police

Abstract

How do rule-based military and police forces emerge, when force in a particular society has earlier been controlled by informal militias operating through patronage and personal connections? This is a vital question for peace enforcement, state-building, and counterinsurgency operations around the world, yet it has not been systematically studied by scholars. In this paper I begin to examine the literature on state-building in early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, to uncover what scholars know about how sovereign security institutions emerged from feudalism. I then apply those conclusions to a pressing current problem: how the United States, its allies and the government of Afghanistan should design the Afghan Local Police (ALP) initiative and similar programs, in order to prevent them from spawning a repeat of the warlordism of the 1990s.