Samenvatting

Since mid-January 2015, nearly 300 soldiers were mobilized by the Belgian government to ensure the safety of public places in Liège, Brussels, Antwerp and Verviers, providing assistance to local and federal police forces. This provoked intense political and public debate about the issue of the provision of security in a democratic society, raising questions such as: which are the goals of security policies and what kind of risks are they supposed to address? Which control instances should be responsible for the provision of security and how should they operate? The central issue, here, is whether either civilian or military actors and practices are the most appropriate for surveillance and policing tasks. As a matter of fact, this discussion goes back to the Belgian independence and has marked the entire history of the Belgian police system, since at the heart of it, there has long been a military police force, the gendarmerie. In this contribution, we examine how the militarization of security and policing tasks evolved across the twentieth century in Belgium, which socio-political conditions shaped these evolutions, and what kind of arguments pro or contra military approaches have been advanced in this process.