Paramilitarization

[Page 722]Paramilitarization refers to the changing nature of the security environment in operations of warfare and domestic law enforcement. The blending of military/war strategies and techniques with police and crime control initiatives has come to represent processes of paramilitarization that alter traditional notions of warfare and policing on a larger scale. However, and more particularly, paramilitaries refer to statutory and/or civil society forces that embody military characteristics and enforce de facto or legal policing powers. The actual expression of paramilitaries differs according to the legal and cultural context where they operate. For instance, some paramilitaries exist in civil war contexts as nonstate or parastate paramilitary forces such as citizen militias, whereas other paramilitaries refer to police units, gendarmaries, or other specialized policing units known as police paramilitary units (PPUs), which are more popularly known as special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams. The paramilitarization of the domestic law enforcement is a growing trend in the criminal justice system. Law enforcement is recognized as being increasingly characterized by reliance on the military/war model in its responses to urban crime, narcotics control, political protest, migration, and border control, as well as in counterterrorism operations. This entry highlights the previously clear-cut distinction between military and police units, defines militarism and militarization, examines the four dimensions of militarism, and finally reviews the various facets of militarization in modern society.

Traditionally, the military is acknowledged as the organization responsible for managing the external practice of war, and the presence of paramilitaries refers to de facto civil militias that embody military characteristics and exact violent force and control on civil society. The police force, by contrast, maintains internal security through the enforcement of laws and statutes. The term paramilitaries, when applied to the domestic policing context, is often interchangeable with militarization and is a more common way to consider the blurring that takes place between law enforcement and war in domestic policing contexts.

The concept of paramilitaries and militarization hinges on a distinction between militarism and militarization. Militarism refers to the ideology of warfare and violent conflict, which are shaped through the adoption of military force techniques, military strategies, tactics, and technologies by police agencies. According to the scholar Peter Kraska in his 2007 article in the journal Policing, as an aspect of militaristic ideology, militarism directly refers to a set of “beliefs, values, and assumptions that stress the use of force and threat of violence as the most appropriate and efficacious means to solve problems” (p. 505). Militarism, as a constellation of ideas, beliefs, and values, valorize the violent use of force as an effective means to manage or solve a particular situation. Militarization, by extension, refers to the actual implementation of the ideology of militarism within the institutional culture and practices of domestic law enforcement.