Polizei(en) und Raum nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg / Polizie e territori dopo la seconda guerra mondiale

Abstract

The Police and Territorial Spaces after the Second World War

This journal issue investigates police forces in Italy and Germany after the Second World War using a practice-based methodological approach, whereby the actual practices of police forces are analysed via the perspective of territorial spaces. Accordingly, the authors enquire into how the police acted within different geographical contexts (towns, provinces and regions) and the ways in which the respective territorial areas were policed.

The contributions in this issue look at the various institutional settings for police activity and the diverging spaces in which police activities are carried out, as well as the numerous forms of exercising state control. In doing so, police forces are understood not just as institutions whose main function is to exercise power in the name of the state, but also as mediators between central state or regional authorities and the specific local contexts in which they carry out their tasks. Hence, police history is narrated both as the history of public spaces and as the history of regional societies.