Samenvatting

This essay is a tentative exercise to compare ideals and practices of daily colonial policing, in particular in the late colonial state of the Dutch East-Indies, to those of present-day international peace and police development missions in post-conflict societies. In both cases we see foreign powers, represented by a minority of experts and professionals, aiming to control (or to assist in controlling) local security problems, out of care and fear; they do so by training indigenous recruits for professional (civil and military) police forces, build on western models of policing which they presume superior. But the most import thing the colonial police and international peace and developmental missions share is their actual weak base of power: both institutions have to operate in states that are characterized by fragmentation of power, by fragile authority and by lack of security control. Both institutions have a problem of legitimacy: the mandate they get from the local population is doubtful. This explains why both the police and international peace missions, whether consciously or not, often fail to solve local power struggles, or to grasp the point of local security problems, sometimes with very dramatic effects.