Transformations of the State's Use of Force in Europe

International audienceThis chapter deals with the transformations that have occurred in the course of the last 40 years in Europe in the state's use of force. This topic calls for two preliminary remarks. The first concerns the narrow terms " use of force ". In what follows, we will make extensive use of this expression, which is commonly used to describe the use of (lethal) force by public police officers. We will also use a classic conception of the state, i.e. a set of institutions aiming at a monopoly of the use of violent and coercive means (Weber 2013, Whitman 2005), including prison and all other means of imprisonment 1. Second, we will consider the approximate date of 1970 as the appropriate timescale for assessing the " transformation " which the paper attempts to track, considering that the end of the 1960s and the begin of the 1970s signalled the start of an overall concern in Western democracies for the problem of crime control and of the diffusion of a given " culture of control " (Garland 2001), characterised by a willingness among the public and the political elites to move away from the dominant " penal-welfare culture ". A useful date in this respect (even though it is taken from outside of the European world) is 1972: that year, the US detention rate reached its lowest level in almost half a century; 40 years later, it has been multiplied by five (Hinds 2005, 48). 1 Since it is dealt in an other paper of the book, my paper will not address the issue of the specific use of force against foreigners (power to arrest, to confine and to deport)