Militarized Policing in the Middle East and North Africa

ABSTRACT This article explains changing patterns in police militarization in the Middle East and North Africa. It presents new data on police forces in nineteen countries in the region, 1946–2020, which demonstrate that police have become more militarized over time – increasingly adopting the weaponry, tactics, and organizational practices of military forces. The authors distinguish between the use of militarized riot squads and tactical units embedded within otherwise civilian police, to which they refer as “militarized civilian policing,” and more-extensively militarized “paramilitary” police. This study argues that while colonial legacies can help explain the ubiquity of paramilitary policing in former French colonies in particular, the increasing use of riot squads and tactical units in more recent decades has been driven in large part by concerns about military intervention in politics, as well as incentives created by international security assistance programs.