ABSTRACT
The history of 'police and policing practices' in the Lusophone world has been neglected by scholars, and the concept of policing has been too prescriptively conceived, as Goncalves and Cachado note. The complications of policing within each jurisdiction were intensified by another factor, one common in other empires and their spheres of interest: many and overlapping styles and organisations policed the Lusophone world. Societal stabilisation in many a colony or metropole enabled demilitarisation of policing and facilitated its professionalisation. In the Lusophone world, however, professionalisation tended to develop within a militarised policing milieu. Even in Lusophone metropolitan and colonial-urban areas, however, the pace and extent of demilitarisation and professionalisation of policing should not be exaggerated; and the task of complexifying and de-binarising does not eliminate the usefulness of concepts clustered under the headings of 'coercion' and 'consent' respectively.
