Academic literature on the topic 'Army, gendarmerie and colonial police'

The article discusses the limited intelligence capabilities of the gendarmerie departments of the Warsaw Governor General (Lomzinska, Warsaw, Kielce, Lublin, and Radom provinces) in the fight against German and Austrian spies in the second half of 1914 and the first half of 1915. One reason for the secret police’s lack of readiness is the reluctance of the gendarmerie-police authorities to organize counter-response work on an appropriate basis. The rare, fragmentary, and not always valuable information received by agents of the investigating authorities did not allow the gendarmes to organize full-scale and successful operational work on a subordinate territory to identify hidden enemies of the state. The low potential, and, in some cases, the complete uselessness of secret service personnel for the interests of the military wanted list led to the fact that most politically disloyal persons were accidentally identified by other special services. In most cases, spies were detected either due to information from army intelligence and counterintelligence agencies, or due to the vigilance of military personnel of the advanced units of the Russian army. The authors conclude that the gendarmerie departments were unable to organize a systematic operational escort of military personnel of the Russian armies deployed in the Warsaw Military District. Despite the fact that the duty of the gendarmerie police included not only criminal procedures, but also operational searches, there was no qualified identification of spies with the help of secret officers.

The article considers some aspects of the history of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russian Federation through the bios of its three outstanding representatives: the first head of the St. Petersburg police Ivan Putilin, the head of the St. Petersburg gendarmerie lieutenant-general Ivan Volkov and the minister of internal affairs of the USSR army general Nikolai Shchelokov.

During the nineteenth century, the maintaining of internal order took place without any real theoretical body of thought to guide its practice. The police, the gendarmerie and the National Guard simply did the job. When normal means proved inadequate to the task, the army would be drawn in. With the lack of any doctrine or specialist units, the intervention of soldiers using firearms caused the deaths of large numbers of demonstrators. After France’s defeat in 1870-71 and the events of the Paris Commune a series of studies, chiefly emanating from military circles, recommended setting up specialist units. The key question was how could the Republic, founded on democratic lines, embrace the preservation of public order by violence ? This recurring question terrified the politicians, however, who feared a praetorian body that might be susceptible to staging a coup d’Etat. Moreover, a sizeable part of the gendarmerie was also opposed to the creation of such a force, whereas the army was seeking to give up its public order role. France would have to wait till the aftermath of the First World War to witness the creation of the Gendarmerie Mobile, a force specifically designed for the internal security mission.

ABSTRACTThe British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was raised in early 1922 by the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, as a striking force and riot squad for Palestine. Through the agency of the Irish police chief, General Hugh Tudor, this British Gendarmerie was recruited almost entirely from amongst the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division, then in the process of disbanding as part of the recent Anglo-Irish settlement. The international notoriety of the Black and Tans led to official efforts to obscure the fact that the force was to be drawn from RIC ranks but these were entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the British Gendarmerie itself quickly acquired a reputation for Black and Tan-type behaviour but an examination of its four-year career indicates that this derived more from preconceptions about the force's composition than from its actual conduct. In fact, in terms of force discipline and levels of police brutality, the British Gendarmerie's record compared very favourably with those of its ‘parent’ forces in Ireland, lending support to recent claims that historians have tended to over-value character-based explanations at the expense of circumstance-based assessments when analysing police behaviour both during the Irish revolution and the Palestine Mandate.

Recruitment in the chaukidari forces under colonial police administration was an alternative to the colonial army for Dalits to get socio-political status, consciousness, ‘economic freedom’ (cash salary, rewards, lands and concessions), education and ‘civic equality’. Therefore, the chaukidari in the colonial police administration was a positive source of support for a section of Dalits, despite the limitation of numbers.

The article presents the beginnings of military police in the Polish territory, which are closely related to the Napoleonic era. It was then that French solutions in terms of internal security formations were adopted. The creation of military police formation, first in the liberated from Russian rule Lithuania, was closely connected with the events of the War of 1812. The failure of the plans to fight a decisive battle at the borders of Russia and the slackness of the Great Army, caused by weather breakdown and inadequate provisions, soon resulted in the disintegration of discipline, an unprecedented number of marauders, and ordinary banditry spreading at an alarming rate. The areas through which Napoleonic troops had marched were completely devastated. In this situation Napoleon, seeking a solution to the problems with ensuring peace at the rear, in his order of July 1st, 1812 appointing the authorities of the liberated Lithuania also commanded the formation of Lithuanian military police. The article discusses the organization of this formation and its participation in the campaign as well as attempts to create similar military police formation in the lands of the Duchy of Warsaw at the turn of 1812 and 1813, when they were threatened by the offensive of the victorious Russian army. It has been emphasized that successive gendarmerie and military police formations created in the Polish territory referred to the traditions of these units.

This article examines the period of Akhmet Baitursynov's life from 1907 to 1910, when he was under the supervision of the tsarist secret police, labeled “politically unreliable”.The article provides data from such sources as a letter from Baitursynov's wife Badrisafa to the Steppe Governor-General Shmit E. O. and articles by Alikhan Bukeikhanov, which provide arguments about the need to release Akhmet Baitursynov from the walls of the Semipalatinsk prison. Archival documents of the office of the Orenburg Governor are also subjected to scientific analysis, including data from the Orenburg gendarmerie about the need for “special supervision” of A. Baitursynov, as a result of his political calls to stop paying taxes and taxes to representatives ofthe colonial regime. The article indicates the reason why Baitursynov's surname was distorted in the police archives of the tsarist period. Thus, even before the events of the February Revolution of 1917 began, Akhmet Baitursynov aroused well-founded fears of the tsarist secret police.

The article explores the essence and content of the preparation and conduct of stabilization actions by military formations with law enforcement functions according to NATO standards. It discusses the activities of the NATO Centres of Excellence, substantiates the concepts, essence, and content of stabilization actions by the security forces of Ukraine. The NATO Advanced Civil-Military Interaction Training Center for Enhancing Qualifications in Law Enforcement Stabilization Actions serves as an international coordination and knowledge hub for the community of interests in the field of stabilization actions with law enforcement characteristics. Currently, the organization consists of the following structures specialized in the described activities: Carabinieri Corps of Italy, Czech Military Police, French Gendarmerie, Greek Army, Polish Military Gendarmerie, Romanian Gendarmerie, Spanish Civil Guard, Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, and Turkish Gendarmerie. The center examines the concept of stabilization actions with law enforcement characteristics applied by NATO member countries in unstable regions (states) in all types of conflicts, ranging from peacetime to high-intensity conflicts. The spectrum of conflicts encompasses four main types of campaigns in which stabilization actions are conducted. Typically, these actions occur both during the initial stages and throughout armed conflicts (combat operations), as well as after their conclusion. The article introduces the definition of law enforcement stabilization actions, which has not been previously reflected in the normative-legal framework of the security sector components of Ukraine. The implementation of a comprehensive set of law enforcement stabilization actions will play a crucial role in the post-war period during the restoration of constitutional order and territorial integrity of Ukraine, which have been affected by Russian occupation.

In interwar Poland, one of the tasks of the military counterintelligence was to combat communist influence, which was rightly judged as one of the most eminent dangers that threatened the state. The Communist Party of Poland carried out its sabotage through the Central Military Department, which the Polish counterintelligence considered an integral part and tool of the General Staff of the Soviet Army. This article discusses the activity of a communist cell in the 14th Infantry Regiment stationed in Włocławek, as well as the liquidation of that cell as a result of cooperation between the Polish State Police, military counterintelligence and gendarmerie. It also discusses the court proceedings against members of the cell at the Military Regional Court no. 8 in Grudziądz.

The archival documents confirm that the police department at the beginning of the 20th century carried out a deep analysis of the socio-political situation, primarily negative processes in the national outskirts of the Russian Empire, foreseeing their undesirable result for state development in the context of modernization and the simultaneous strengthening of the social and revolutionary movement in the Steppe region. The materials of the article confirm that, despite the defeat of the First Russian Revolution of 1905-1907, the general crisis of the autocratic form of government intensified, which resulted in the failure of the colonial policy on the territory of the national outskirts of the Russian Empire, including Kazakhstan. This can be seen on the example of studying the documents of the office of the Orenburg Governor, the Omsk gendarmerie department on the situation in the Karkaralinsky district at the beginning of the 20th century. At the same time, an analysis of archival materials is being carried out, how the police supervision of Akhmet Baitursynov was carried out. Sources identified in the course of work with the funds of the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the State Archives of the Orenburg Region, allowed the authors to study the details of the political investigation behind the leaders Alash, A. Baitursynov and his closest associates. The study allows us to understand the forms and methods of political investigation in the Russian Empire by the gendarmerie and the police, to find out who directly carried out this policy in the Orenburg province and the Steppe region. The general conclusion is the thesis that the Kazakh national intelligentsia, despite the opposition and repressive measures on the part of the tsarist authorities, became an integral part of the people's liberation movement in the countries of the East.

La problématique de la déportation ou des déportés d’Afrique de l’Ouest, durant l’ère coloniale, n’est pas assez prise en charge par l’historiographie africaine d’expression française et même anglaise qui s'est davantage appesantie plus sur les guerres, les résistances et leurs différentes formes. Ce faisant, une réalité d’un pan de l’histoire coloniale reste plus ou moins méconnue. C'est pourquoi nous voudrions étudier le thème suivant, qui a été et demeure d’une actualité brûlante: « Les déportés de la Sénégambie et du Soudan : entre résistances et répressions dans un espace colonial de 1840 à 1946 ». Les acteurs de cette histoire des déportés sont des figures emblématiques et/ou de simples anonymes, qui ont voulu défendre la terre de leurs ancêtres, diriger les destinées de leurs peuples, lutter pour le maintien des valeurs et des traditions africaines. L’histoire de « ces soldats du refus » – à savoir les chefs religieux, les combattants au service de l’islam et des valeurs ou croyances ancestrales et les chefs politiques auxquels s’ajoutent les aliénés mentaux, les bandits sociaux et délinquants, les hommes de presse, les partisans et/ou disciples des chefs et même les tirailleurs sénégalais – mérite d’être examinée. Cette thèse s’inscrit dans les questionnements d’une histoire coloniale attentive aux enjeux de la répression et du maintien de l’ordre. Face au refus manifeste des meneurs de troupes ou créateurs d’émotions de se résigner au diktat colonial, la réponse donnée par les autorités coloniales était, entre autres, de les déporter/emprisonner, les assigner en résidence surveillée, leur interdire de séjour, pour leur couper toute forme de communication, tout contact avec leur entourage et les mettre ainsi hors d’état de nuire. Dans de nombreux cas, il s'agissait d'une forme d'emprisonnement, ce qui nous conduit à l'étude du milieu carcéral qui dévoile les formes d’évitement, les conditions de vie des déportés, l’architecture liée aux questions sécuritaires, etc. L’application de cette technique de répression, entrant dans la logique des politiques de sécurité, était une manière de freiner l’élan des chefs et d’anéantir toutes les résistances coloniales. L'étude que nous souhaitons conduire vise surtout à cerner la place déterminante de la déportation dans le dispositif de répression coloniale, dans le maintien de l’ordre sécuritaire, de mainmise politique, de contrôle des hommes et des espaces, pour l’exploitation des colonies. La trame chronologique que ce travail tente d’éclairer va de 1840 à 1946, une période charnière de l’histoire coloniale en Afrique de l’Ouest, particulièrement en Sénégambie et au Soudan, en ce sens qu’elle est marquée par des transformations rapides à tous les niveaux (politique, économique, social et culturel). La déportation était-elle si fondamentale, si nécessaire pour la réalisation du projet colonial, le maintien de l’ordre sécuritaire ? Dans quelle mesure les déportés constituaient-ils un réel obstacle, une entrave à l’implantation et à l’imposition du pouvoir colonial ? Quel a été le rôle des acteurs de l’ordre dans le processus de déportation ? Cette thèse explore des thématiques majeures telles que les contextes de déportation, les abus de pouvoir des administrateurs coloniaux, l’Indigénat et la justice indigène, les motivations de la déportation, les multiples réponses des indigènes, leur arrestation et déportation, la place des agents/acteurs (armée, gendarmerie et police coloniales) dans le maintien, le rétablissement et/ou la protection de la stabilité et les conséquences politico-économiques d’une telle « technique de pouvoir»
The problem of deportation or deportees from West Africa during the colonial era is not sufficiently addressed by French- and even English-speaking African historiography, which has focused more on wars, resistances and their different forms. In doing so, a reality of a part of colonial history remains more or less unknown. That is why we would like to study the following theme, which has been and remains of burning topicality: "The deportees of Senegambia and Sudan: between resistance and repression in a colonial space from 1840 to 1946". The actors in this story of the deportees are emblematic figures and/or simple anonymous, who wanted to defend the land of their ancestors, direct the destinies of their peoples, fight for the maintenance of African values and traditions. The history of "these soldiers of refusal" – namely religious leaders, fighters in the service of Islam and ancestral values or beliefs and political leaders to which are added the mentally insane, social bandits and delinquents, men of the press, supporters and/or followers of leaders and even Senegalese riflemen – deserves to be examined. This thesis is part of the questions of a colonial history attentive to the issues of repression and the maintenance of order. Faced with the manifest refusal of the leaders of troops or creators of emotions to resign themselves to the colonial diktat, the response given by the colonial authorities was, among other things, to deport/imprison them, to house arrest, to prohibit them from staying, to cut them off all forms of communication, any contact with their entourage and thus put them out of harm's way. In many cases, it was a form of imprisonment, which leads us to the study of the prison environment that reveals the forms of avoidance, the living conditions of the deportees, the architecture related to security issues, etc. The application of this technique of repression, part of the logic of security policies, was a way of slowing down the momentum of the leaders and annihilating all colonial resistance. The study we wish to conduct aims above all to identify the decisive place of deportation in the system of colonial repression, in the maintenance of security order, political control, control of people and spaces, for the exploitation of colonies. The chronological framework that this work attempts to illuminate goes from 1840 to 1946, a pivotal period in colonial history in West Africa, particularly in Senegambia and Sudan, in that it is marked by rapid transformations at all levels (political, economic, social and cultural). Was deportation so fundamental, so necessary for the realization of the colonial project, the maintenance of security order? To what extent did the deportees constitute a real obstacle, an obstacle to the establishment and imposition of colonial power? What was the role of law enforcement actors in the deportation process? This thesis explores major themes such as the contexts of deportation, the abuse of power by colonial administrators, indigénat and indigenous justice, the motivations of deportation, the multiple responses of indigenous people, their arrest and deportation, the place of agents/actors (army, gendarmerie and colonial police) in maintaining, restoring and/or protecting stability and the politico-economic consequences of such a "technique of power"

This chapter traces the history of the Nigerien gendarmerie. The gendarmes and their colonial predecessors—the tirailleurs, méharistes, gardes de cercle, and colonial gendarmes—have always worked in vast rural Niger, populated almost exclusively by subsistence farmers and pastoralists. Since the early twentieth century, these “strangers” have disciplined the rural population, managed the French colonial, later Nigerien national territory, spread French as the national language, established bureaucratic procedures, and imposed French colonial, then Nigerien national law. They have been advancing into a sphere they perceived as an “institutional vacuum” open to legitimate intrusion and in need of a new social order. Working between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, rural police forces tried to make society legible to govern it and turn a social hieroglyph into an administratively more convenient format of numbers and texts. At the same time, they attempted to impose a normative order on what they perceive as a savage and chaotic illegitimate sphere. The gendarmes have been pushing this frontier ever since; yet it cannot be crossed—it is the bureaucratic horizon that moves with them.

"The executives and members of the Trakya Paşaeli Cemiyeti (Thracian Paşaeli Society) relocated to Bulgaria following the occupation of Edirne on July 25, 1920. Under the guidance of Kasım Yolageldili in Kızanlık and Eski Zağra, they established militias and coordinated assaults against the Greek military and police outposts. They hindered the Greek army's progress from Thrace to Anatolia and bolstered the National Struggle spearheaded by Mustafa Kemal Pasha. While in Bulgaria, the leadership of the society, organization members, and militia leaders corresponded and shared intelligence with one another. Some of these letters were encrypted. From the correspondence, it is clear that the society members effectively utilized their established intelligence network and garnered support from local Greeks in their actions against the Greek army. In several letters, ongoing differences of opinion among the society members are evident, even during their stay in Bulgaria. In one letter penned by Kasım Yolageldili, he firmly addressed these disagreements, asserting, “No matter what anyone says,I am loyal to Anatolia, to Ankara.” The gang commanders consistently reported their past and planned activities to Kasım Yolageldili, the director of the Thracian PaşaeliSociety, through their written correspondence, highlighting their challenges and needs. As the Greek army began its retreat, the leaders and gang members of the Thracian Paşaeli Society, who had sought refuge in Bulgaria, worked to maintain stability in the villages. Their efforts persisted until the Turkish Gendarmerie entered Edirne on November 24, 1922, and other occupation forces withdrew. Following the pivotal victory in Anatolia and the liberation of Thrace from Greek control, the Turkish gendarmerie entered Edirne on November 24, 1922, restoring order. Following the formal surrender of Edirne onNovember 25, 1922, society membersreturned from Bulgaria, and the gangs subsequently disbanded their operations."

This chapter examines the idea of a comradeship that was established by sharing in intoxicating acts of obliteration that encompassed the most atrocious manifestations of human behavior. It analyses the linkage between intoxication, fury, and destruction that existed in the German army prior to the rise of National Socialism. The Wehrmacht, like its SS and police counterparts, also had a distinct organizational culture, and this culture was defined by specific beliefs, norms, and rituals, including hard drinking, that reinforced group identity and established expectations of its members. For such distinguished organizational culture, the chapter presents how this military culture established a “cult of violence” and created a trajectory for the armies of the Third Reich leading to genocide in World War II. Ultimately, the chapter investigates the racial superiority and a colonial mentality created following the maelstrom of violence inflicted on the peoples of the occupied East.

Agrarian National Union (BZNS) - created an illegal paramilitary organization, which was called the “Orange Guard” by its contemporaries. Having come to power in 1920, the BZNS, instead of relying on official power structures such as the army, gendarmerie and police, continued to develop its own paramilitary structure. There are very few documents revealing its composition, number of members, tasks performed and their specific activities. Despite direct participation of the Guard in the internal political struggle of that period, the information about them in scientific literature also is scarce and fragmentary. During the Second World War, the archive of the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control, which in 1919 -1927 performed supervisory functions over Bulgaria's implementation of the military articles of the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, came at the disposal of the Soviet command as a military trophy. In the Russian State Military Historical Archive, the author found the materials related to the activities of the commission. The paper analyzes a document that is supposedly a draft regulation on the recruitment to the “Orange Guard”.

Abstract Rags, and textiles more generally, constitute the focus of Chapter 5. After explaining the constrictions in the textile economy during the 1930s, the chapter examines the development of textile pilfering in the Nazi-occupied east. In occupied Poland, the Nazis coerced thousands of ghettoized Jews into textile workshops, where they toiled for their survival while outfitting the German army and police formations. In Soviet territory, the destructive entrepreneurship of the so-called Ostgesellschaften, companies that merged administrative and market-based structures for the purpose of gutting enemy territory, ostensibly “developed” the colonial lands. Instead of expanding crops of textile fibers, the regime ended up mining the local population for rags and other inferior products. In addition, they forced underresourced and terrorized workers in ghettos and labor camps in the occupied east to turn the spoils of genocide—human hair—into felt boots for German soldiers.

Abstract This chapter emphasizes Anglo-Indian roles defending the colonial state, and intertwined anxieties concerning their future in a self-governing India. Anglo-Indians served in the police, the Intelligence Branch, and the Raj's strategically sensitive transport and communication infrastructure, principally the railways, telegraphs, and customs services. After the disbandment of the Anglo-Indian Force/AIF following the conclusion of the Great War, Army authorities refused to recognise Anglo-Indians as a "martial race", substituting de facto compulsory enlistment in the Auxiliary Force (India)/AF(I). Nonetheless, despite ongoing discrimination, Anglo-Indians remained keen to volunteer for the Royal Air Force/RAF during the Second World War. In these military and auxiliary roles Anglo-Indians policed anticolonial terrorism, infrastructural/industrial sabotage, civil unrest, and intercommunal conflict, especially Hindu-Muslim. British parliamentary debates over Anglo-Indians' future involved Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, while the proposals of the Cripps Mission of 1942 stunned Henry Gidney, encouraging agricultural colonisation in McCluskiegunge (founded by Earnest Timothy McCluskie) and the Britasian League of Calcutta's proposed Andaman Islands scheme. Colonisation assumed various guises-- Europeanising, Christianising, segregationist, confidently mixed, or pan-Eurasiainist--triangulating between pro-British, pro-Indian, and separationist orientations. The chapter concludes with the discordant cases of a Nazi sympathizer and Colonel Cyril John Stracey of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army/INA.

The Sokoto Caliphate, prior to 1964 generally referred to in print as the Fulani Empire, was Africa’s largest pre-colonial state and lasted for a century, coming into being in 1808 through a four-year jihad and finally in 1903 being conquered by Britain. As an Islamic state, it was run as a decentralized confederation of emirates under the supervision of the caliph and his bureaucracy in Sokoto. Though almost all the emirs initially were scholars chosen for their piety, they could be identified ethnically as Fulani/Fulbe (hence the “Fulani Empire”) whereas the majority of the population were Hausa-speakers. There was a very large number of slaves (at times over 50 percent), serving the elite or working as labor on farms, which supplied food to large households and markets in the cities. There was no standing army, but borders were closed by strategically sited ribats or strongholds. Conflicts were resolved by local administrators, with the courts using Shari‘a law; servants of local officials acted as police. The chapter’s argument is that the Sokoto Caliphate is more accurately categorized not as an “imperial” polity but as an Islamic state modeled as a confederation on Abbasid practice.

Abstract This chapter seeks to explore the impact of suspended rights and enforced social distancing associated with the Covid-19 lockdown on rural communities in South Africa. Using the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's ideas about "states of exception", the chapter shows how the bio-medical model and discourse returned to old liberal, colonial narratives that pathologized customary practice. On public occasions it was common for the President and senior politicians to warn against the culture of customary practices in rural areas, especially large rural funerals. This fear mongering was backed up by the police and army that swept through rural areas tipping over home-brewed beer and meat pots, while closing initiation school and effecting tens of thousands of arrests, including migrants going home. As communities and families could no longer gather, stripped-down death rituals and social events caused fear and panic rather than closure and certainty. In the context of death and indignity, the "bare life" of post-apartheid poverty and precarity had descended into a kind of "naked life," where the possibility of social reproduction appeared to ebb away in the cultural crisis of Covid.