Authoritarian Polities Research Articles

Community policing: Variations on the western model in the developing world

As countries in the developing world struggle to move from authoritarian policing to democratic policing, they have searched for models to adopt. This paper uses four case studies in Latin America and Africa to explore how the concept of community policing has been adapted to local environments. Our case studies reveal that efforts to introduce community policing in developing countries frequently run into serious difficulties, often hindered by low levels of professionalism of police agencies, public disrespect for law enforcement, lack of community organization, and other contextual factors. Focusing on Brazil, Haiti, Uganda, and South Africa, we have found that there is no single uniform model of community policing. Each example illustrates how influential the local context and history are in shaping the development of community-policing programs and in the eventual success of each application.

Policing, Democratization and Political Leadership in Postcommunist Ukraine

Policing, a subject little studied by North American political scientists, has considerable relevance to newly democratizing countries, particularly those emerging from communist rule. Taking the case of Ukraine, the article examines what measures have been adopted to transform that country's Soviet pattern of authoritarian policing into something resembling that of established European liberal democracies. The balance sheet shows few signs of positive change. Instead, thanks to President Leonid Kuchma's leadership, the politicization and corruption of the police is now more blatant than ever. A new form of police state, not seen in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, threatens the rule of law and democracy along with it.

Democratic police reforms in war-torn societies

This article reviews the initial questions surrounding the design of police reforms in war-torn societies, by examining the ‘demobilisation dilemma’ and issues pertaining to force composition, which are key to the reinsertion of combatants and to the political legitimacy of new security arrangements. Police reform must be understood as more than a process of skills transfer from international donors to a ‘rookie’ national force. Many of the most serious challenges derive from weak judiciaries, high crime rates and embedded authoritarian cultures. These factors often spur governments to reintroduce military forces and to increase police powers and legal penalties, thereby jeopardising newly-won rights and risking a return to authoritarian policing. Studies indicate that police must be responsive and respectful and must win public cooperation if they are to be e?ective in ?ghting crime and maintaining public order. This requires a multi-sectoral strategy, encompassing a wide range of actors: from the military and civilian police in peacekeeping operations to donors that provide support for democratic institutional, economic and social development.

AMOS ELON, A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Pp. 332. $37.00 cloth, $16.50 paper.

An argument that the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians can be resolved no longer seems utopian, and some might even assert that it no longer needs to be made. It is in this sense that this book of essays by the Israeli journalist and essayist Amos Elon is important, for it describes how deeply the conflict has structured regional political developments and how much is involved in breaking the cycles of violence and hostility. Elon's perspective on the prolonged confrontation between Israel and the Arab world conveys a strong sense of contingency: the confrontation that is taken for granted as a fixture of Middle Eastern politics is interpreted by Elon as the result of bad choices made by politicians whose attachment to the past turned into an unbearable burden for the future. With his powerful prose, Elon raises fundamental questions about the authoritarian polities characteristic of the Arab states, as well as about the nature of Israeli democracy and its concentration of political power. These essays, mostly drawn from previously published articles in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books from 1967 through 1995, provoke a serious critique of Israel's dominant culture even as they are very much a product of it.

Patterns of culture and democratization in Kuwait

Conventional wisdom asserts that Islam and tribalism dispose the countries of the Arab Middle East against democratization. Yet the local culture in the region resembles those in the ancient world where democracy was first established, and neither resembles the pattern of political development that occurred in Western Europe, today’s democratic paradigm. Kuwait, a city-state that has enjoyed a high level of collective wealth throughout the period following World War II, displays many of the attributes of the “positive liberty” that Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, and others see as characteristic of ancient democracies. Vigorous participation in a range of public spaces acts as a check on runaway state power. Kuwait’s record on “negative liberty” is poor, which is why it diverges from the western European model. Population growth and its effect on political development is eroding Kuwait’s qualities as a city-state and pushing it toward mass politics. It is not possible at this stage to predict with any confidence whether these new trends will result in further liberalization or a more authoritarian polity.

Arab Public Opinion and the Gulf War

While it is generally assumed that public opinion matters little in authoritarian polities, I argue in this article that on issues of foreign policy, Arab public opinion has a discernible impact on the foreign policies of Arab states; moreover, in the conduct of the Persian Gulf War, Arab public opinion was a key element in the strategies of the central parties. I also argue that the absence of the predicted upheavals in the Middle East following the smashing of Iraq was partly due to the success of members of the alliance in controlling some of the variables that help shape Arab public opinion, partly to the failure of Saddam Hussein to deliver what he promised, and partly to the fact that the allies took seriously the predictions of the public upheaval.

Vertical Integration and Political Control in Eastern Europe: The Polish and Romanian Cases

The legitimacy of ruling Communist parties rests, in large part, on their alleged identity with the working masses. Ties to the citizenry are crucial for these parties if they are to retain Marxist credentials and, thereby, their rationale for taking power and maintaining an authoritarian system. All political systems, authoritarian ones included, seek willing obedience from citizens if for no other reason than efficiency. But as a subset of authoritarian polities, Communist states have an additional burden. No ultimate truth, national interest, or religious purity sanctioned their road to power, although national interests are increasingly used by many Communist parties to attain greater credibility with citizens. Instead, Communists' identity with the interests of working people constitutes the primary rationale for their hold on government.

Barrington Moore and the Preconditions for Democracy

Anxiety about the conditions that promote stable, democratic political relations in the developing countries has been a major preoccupation of both politicians and academics for over a generation now. One manifestation of this concern is the emergence of a new field of inquiry — the study of development — in the social sciences. The conditions most often put forward for political democracy fall into two general and by no means unrelated categories — cultural institutions, or values, and economic development. Political sociologists generally focus on one category or the other. Some, like Harry Eckstein and S. M. Lipset, concentrate mainly on cultural variables, the ‘patterns of integration’ supposedly conducive to the development and maintenance of democratic or authoritarian polities. Those who focus upon economic growth seem to fall into two groups. One school of thought, well represented by Daniel Lerner, emphasizes that democracy, as we understand it, is the end product of the modernization process; and the implicit assumption is that it is the inevitable end product of this process. The other trend in modernization thought, represented most notably by Professor Barrington Moore, argues that political democracy is the result of only a certain type of modernization — namely, the Anglo-American bourgeois variety.

Value Conflicts in Law Enforcement

In law enforcement, goal-oriented guides for behavior must be made explicit. Unclarified value conflicts result in irrelevant or inappropriate outcomes in police encounters. The sources of values are both personal and social. The former are largely derived from early personal experiences; the latter from the outside community (the middle class) and from formal and in formal demands within the police apparatus. The middle-class status of most police officers causes them to emphasize prompt ness, cleanliness, propriety, and orderliness. These values differ somewhat from those of lower-class society, where life may be a battle for survival. The police officer, usually poorly prepared for understanding persons from different backgrounds, finds it hard to cope with the conflict in values. Already alienated in an authoritarian police bureaucracy, he also feels alienated in the neighborhood in which he works. This increases his own sus picion and fear and conversely that of the lower-class persons whom he encounters.