Cycles of Policing and Insurgency in Britain, 1960s–1980s

Abstract

Abstract This chapter shows that in Britain, a new round of militarization began in the early 1970s in London, when the London Special Patrol Group was repurposed from a seemingly benign crime-fighting unit into a heavily militarized force devoted to countering subversion and insurgency. The transformation, which can be named counterinsurgenization, occurred through the importation of recent counterinsurgency theories, tools, and techniques that had been developing in Britain’s imperial peripheries, from Malaya and Kenya to Hong Kong and Northern Ireland. The original impetus was racialized threat, and in the 1980s the counterinsurgenization of British policing did not stop insurgency but provoked it. This perpetuated a larger cycle of militarized policing, insurgency, and militarization that continued into the early 2000s.