ABSTRACT
Recent years have witnessed the creation of new institutional arrangements for policing at the international, regional and national levels, and have seen peace support and other operations drawing on police capabilities to an unprecedented degree. Most strikingly, some countries have begun to undertake executive policing actions and ‘in-line’ roles in other states. This chapter explores some of the ethical questions arising from recent moves to deploy domestic security agents in external jurisdictions. It begins by tracing the historical development of international policing operations, establishing what practices have come to be seen as being acceptable by the international community since the post-war years. Two recent case study deployments to Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea are then briefly explored to better understand the very real practical and ethical issues involved in the ‘new international policing’ phenomenon. 1 The chapter considers the ethical aspects of such deployments in light of contemporary intewrnational norms before bringing in more virtue and consequentionalist-oriented arguments. The overall shift to a ‘new international policing’ paradigm is deemed to correspond with changing international norms regarding international peace, order and security and the overarching need to ensure state sovereignty, but the chapter closes with a cautionary note about the need to challenge as well as affirm those norms if we are to realise a more ethical world.
