Assistant Professor of Government Erica De Bruin recently participated in a roundtable discussion titled “Everything Looks Like a War: State Security Forces and Citizen Security.”
The virtual event was hosted by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS), a consortium of Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University. Based at Duke, the organization is focused on advancing research and education in the field of national and international security. TISS Director Tricia Sullivan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the moderator.
Prompted by recent criticism by human rights organizations of the way the U.S. has handled protests by Black Lives Matters and other organizations, De Bruin and her fellow panelists discussed questions including:
- Does state repression in democracies differ from state repression in non-democracies in kind or only by degree?
- Has there been an erosion of the institutions that constrain the ability of elites to co-opt the coercive power of state security forces in the United States and other democracies? If so, what are the drivers of this erosion?
- In what ways have those institutions been insufficient throughout our history?
- How does the militarization of policing—the increasing use of military gear, training, and tactics in domestic policing—impact citizen security?
