New perspectives in post-transitional policing studies

Introduction
The social, economic and technological developments of the late modern society have radically changed policing approaches both at national and supranational levels. The anti-terrorism discourse has placed the security needs of citizens at the pinnacle of government priorities, but at the same time traditional law enforcement have faced an epistemological crisis through the privatization of security. On the one hand, governments, and especially the police, are expected to either prevent or respond to security threats, and if necessary, to ensure order through rigorous measures. On the other hand, the traditional means of policing have increasing difficulties to sustain their legitimacy both in the national and in the supranational setting.

Regarding the subject of public security, five political and police changes can be identified as a reaction to these new developments:

The changes in the relationship between organizational and management rules between the state and other governing bodies,
The system of out-of-court measures,
The emphasis on a victim-centred approach,
The use of new technologies, and
The fusion of different security units, such as intelligence services, the military, and the police.
These changes together with the existing security concerns indicate new tensions in policing practices and urge the adaptation of new theoretical approaches. Although several conceptual differentiations are made between policing practices, hardly any theoretical studies discuss the implication of contextual differences between traditional welfare states and new democratic governments.

Therefore, the publication focuses on creating a critical interdisciplinary approach through contextualised thematic analyses of policing practices after the digital turn. All topics will be discussed from a theoretical perspective, and will assess questions of how digitalisation, ultra-state policing and privatisation have changed traditional policing approaches. The editors will seek chapters that address different aspects of policing in post-transitional contexts such as the privatisation of policing tasks, the changing power-relations between police, the state, and society, communication between police institutions and militarised policing practices in different countries.
While challenging existing theoretical approaches in Anglo-Saxon policing studies, the book aims to promote critical law enforcement studies and the need for new conceptual approaches.