Military Policing in Advanced Democracies: Italy in Comparative Perspective

This book investigates the conditions under which governments in advanced democracies choose to deploy the armed forces for domestic security. It develops a theoretical framework that conceptualizes military policing as a policy instrument and identifies the circumstances that lead governing parties to rely on the military rather than the police to implement law-and-order agendas. The analysis shows that armed forces are often favored because they can be deployed more rapidly and at lower cost than the police. In other words, the book argues that military deployments frequently respond to economic convenience and become particularly attractive under conditions of fiscal constraint. The framework is tested on the Italian case, the country that relies most heavily on the armed forces for domestic security in Europe, drawing on a wide range of empirical evidence, including more than fifty interviews with military officers, politicians, and police officials, as well as parliamentary debates and press sources. The book also includes an exploratory analysis assessing the applicability of the framework to other European states. Unlike most existing studies, which focus largely on Latin America, this work offers one of the first comprehensive analyses of the causal factors driving military policing in advanced European democracies, making a significant contribution to the study of civil–military relations. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of military studies, civil–military relations, policing, and security studies, as well as to think tanks and policymakers seeking to understand the political dynamics behind domestic military deployments.