ABSTRACT
In Madrid, Barcelona, and other cities, police have sought to protect state government buildings against street protests and riots. Human rights is one such filter on action inviting powerful authorities, but recently authoritarian neoliberalism is another. As the historian Charles Reith noted, Sir Robert Peel’s great achievement was to establish in Great Britain a modern police whose mission it was to instill not an abject fear of state power and authority, but the upholding of the rule of law on the willing consent of the public. As an affordance to police practice, the discourse and implementation of human rights is too enormous to take on in its entirety here, nor is it necessary to rehearse all of its intersections on police conduct. There are variations in thinking on the uptake of authoritarianism as adjunct to neoliberalism that have been developed under various theoretical traditions, but we will have space for a synopsis of two recent treatments.
