# Paramilitaries: the armed force between soldier and police The armed force between army and police, used for internal control: the gendarmerie tradition from the Carabinieri to the Guardia Civil; the Royal Irish Constabulary as the model colonial paramilitary, the Black and Tans and the B-Specials; and colonial reserves from Kenya's Home Guard to the Selous Scouts. *This story part of: The history of policing and the police state* *This story parallel: Colonial concentration camps and atrocities across the empires* *This story parallel: Northern Ireland: the Troubles and collusion* *This story parallel: Special Branch and colonial political policing* *This story parallel: The National Guard: militia, statehood, and the streets* *This story parallel: The other badges: private police and federal agencies* *This story part of: Military and security* *Client dictators: the strongmen the powers kept parallel this story* *The Free World's clients: the West's unfree allies parallel this story* *Ireland: from the island of saints to the Republic parallel this story* *The Home Guard: citizen defence then and now parallel this story* *The militarization of the police parallel this story* ## c. 1536 — The Maréchaussée established as France's mounted royal police The Maréchaussée grew out of the provost marshals who policed royal armies and, by the sixteenth century, was turned outward to patrol the French countryside and highways. An edict in 1536 organized it as a mounted force with military rank and discipline that answered to the crown rather than to local towns. It is usually treated as the direct ancestor of the modern gendarmerie and the template for a soldier-policeman charged with keeping order among civilians. ## c. 1720 — The Maréchaussée reorganized into a national brigade system In the early eighteenth century the French crown spread the Maréchaussée across the kingdom as small permanent brigades stationed in the provinces. Each brigade of a few troopers patrolled a set district, lodged in barracks, and reported up a central chain of command. This design, an armed force living among the rural population under military discipline, became the working model that later gendarmeries copied. ## 16 February 1791 — The Gendarmerie nationale created from the Maréchaussée During the French Revolution a law renamed the old Maréchaussée the Gendarmerie nationale, keeping its military structure while placing it in the new revolutionary state. The force remained soldiers in law, subject to army discipline, yet did the everyday work of rural policing. The name and the dual military-civil status spread through Europe and gave the world the word gendarmerie. ## c. 1804 — Napoleon exports the gendarmerie model across Europe As French armies occupied and reorganized much of Europe, Napoleon planted gendarmerie-style forces in the territories he controlled, from the Low Countries to Italy and the German states. These forces combined military organization with routine policing and often outlived French rule. The pattern set the mold for a permanent armed police answerable to the central state that many European countries kept long after 1815. ## 13 July 1814 — The Carabinieri founded in the Kingdom of Sardinia King Victor Emmanuel I created the Corps of Carabinieri as a mounted and foot force to guard the restored Savoyard state, modeled closely on the French gendarmerie. The Carabinieri were both a branch of the armed forces and a police force for the general public, a dual role they carry to this day. As Italy unified, the corps became the country's senior national police with a permanent military status. ## 26 October 1814 — The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee established The newly independent Kingdom of the Netherlands created the Koninklijke Marechaussee, taking both the French gendarmerie model and its name from the old Maréchaussée left behind by French occupation. It served as a military police force that also handled civil policing in parts of the country and, later, border and colonial duties. Its survival shows how the gendarmerie template outlasted the Napoleonic empire that spread it. ## 1836 — The Irish Constabulary consolidated into a national armed police Building on county forces begun under Robert Peel in the 1820s, the Constabulary (Ireland) Act of 1836 merged them into a single centralized Irish Constabulary. Unlike the unarmed London police Peel had also founded, this force was armed, barracked, and drilled like soldiers, and it answered to Dublin Castle rather than to local towns. It became the working model of a colonial paramilitary police for controlling a population Britain governed as subjects. ## 28 March 1844 — The Guardia Civil founded in Spain Spain established the Guardia Civil by decree in 1844 as a militarized national force to police the countryside and roads, which had been plagued by banditry and unrest. Organized on military lines and housed in barracks called casas cuartel, its members lived apart from the communities they policed. The Guardia Civil became a lasting symbol of centralized armed order in Spain and a model cited across the Spanish-speaking world. ## c. 1867 — The Royal Irish Constabulary and its colonial export The Irish Constabulary was granted the prefix Royal in 1867 after helping suppress the Fenian rising, becoming the RIC. Its training depot in Dublin's Phoenix Park schooled officers who went on to organize armed police across the empire, from India and Palestine to colonial Africa. Historians describe the RIC as the archetype Britain exported wherever it needed an armed, centralized force to police colonized peoples, distinct from the unarmed model used at home in England. ## c. March 1920 — The Black and Tans recruited for Ireland As the Irish War of Independence spread, Britain recruited demobilized First World War soldiers to reinforce the depleted RIC, and shortages of uniforms left them in a mix of dark police and khaki army dress that earned the nickname Black and Tans. Loosely disciplined and often violent, they became notorious for reprisals against civilians and property. Their name endures in Ireland as shorthand for the brutality of paramilitary policing. ## c. July 1920 — The Auxiliary Division formed within the RIC Separate from the Black and Tans, the Auxiliary Division of the RIC was recruited from former British Army officers and organized into mobile companies to hunt the Irish Republican Army. Better paid and more heavily armed, the Auxiliaries operated with wide latitude and were tied to some of the war's most notorious reprisals. Together with the Black and Tans they came to symbolize Britain using ex-soldiers as a militarized police against an insurgency. ## 21 November 1920 — Bloody Sunday in Dublin On the morning of 21 November 1920 IRA units killed a group of British intelligence officers in Dublin. That afternoon, RIC forces including Auxiliaries and Black and Tans opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, killing fourteen civilians. The day became a defining atrocity of the war and a lasting example of how armed police reprisals fell on ordinary people. ## c. November 1920 — The Ulster Special Constabulary and the B-Specials As Ireland partitioned, the Ulster Special Constabulary was raised in the north as an auxiliary armed police, divided into full-time A, part-time B, and reserve C classes. The part-time B-Specials, drawn almost entirely from the Protestant unionist community, became a lasting grievance among Catholics who saw them as a sectarian militia in uniform. They were disbanded in 1970 after the Hunt Report criticized their role, and their functions passed to new forces. ## 1 June 1922 — The Royal Ulster Constabulary established The Royal Ulster Constabulary was formed in 1922 as the police force of the new Northern Ireland, inheriting the armed and centralized character of the old RIC. Throughout the Troubles it operated as a heavily armed force facing an insurgency, and critics argued it drew overwhelmingly from one community. It was replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2001 following the Patten Commission's reforms. ## 8 December 1944 — France's Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité formed France created the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the CRS, in 1944 as mobile reserve units for crowd control and public order. Housed in barracks and deployed as units rather than beat officers, the CRS became the face of French riot policing, alongside the Gendarmerie mobile. The two forces show how modern states keep standing formations organized more like light infantry than ordinary police for controlling protest and unrest. ## c. 1946 — The disputed School of the Americas connection The US Army School of the Americas, founded in 1946 and later based at Fort Benning, trained thousands of Latin American military and police officers during the Cold War. Critics and human rights groups have attributed later abuses to graduates and pointed to interrogation manuals the Pentagon acknowledged and withdrew in the 1990s. Supporters counter that only a small share of graduates were implicated, so the causal link between the school and specific atrocities is contested rather than settled. ## c. 1953 — The Kenya Police Reserve and Home Guard in the Mau Mau Emergency During the state of emergency against the Mau Mau uprising, British authorities relied on the Kenya Police Reserve and a locally recruited Home Guard of loyalist Africans to hold the countryside. These auxiliary units were armed and used to garrison villages, man screening posts, and fight insurgents. Later historians and a 2013 British court settlement documented widespread abuses during the emergency, and the Home Guard's role in it remains a bitter memory in Kenya. ## c. October 1965 — Militias in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66 After a failed coup in 1965, the Indonesian army oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists in which civilian militias and youth groups did much of the killing. Historians estimate at least half a million people died, with groups such as Pemuda Pancasila and religious youth wings acting alongside the military. The episode is documented in scholarship and later testimony as a case of army-organized militias carrying out mass killing. ## c. 1967 — Portugal's Flechas in the African colonial wars As Portugal fought independence movements in its African colonies, its secret police the PIDE, later the DGS, recruited local irregulars known as the Flechas to track and fight the guerrillas. Drawn from indigenous groups and trained in bush warfare, they operated as a police-run paramilitary rather than a regular army unit. The Flechas are cited as an example of a colonial power turning a political police into a counter-insurgency force. ## c. 1969 — Loyalist and republican paramilitaries in the Troubles From the late 1960s the conflict in Northern Ireland produced armed non-state groups on both sides, including the Provisional IRA on the republican side and the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association on the loyalist side. These paramilitaries ran their own armed campaigns of killings and bombings outside any state chain of command. Their existence blurred the line between soldier, police, and armed civilian faction across three decades of violence. ## c. 1973 — Rhodesia's British South Africa Police and Selous Scouts White-ruled Rhodesia policed its majority-Black population through the British South Africa Police, a paramilitary force dating from the colony's founding, alongside military counter-insurgency units. The Selous Scouts, formed in 1973, were a mixed-race special unit that ran covert operations against the liberation movements during the bush war. These forces are a standard example of a settler state using militarized police and irregular units for internal control. ## c. 1979 — Koevoet counter-insurgency unit in South West Africa Apartheid South Africa formed Koevoet, a police counter-insurgency unit, to fight SWAPO guerrillas in occupied South West Africa. Nominally a police wing but operating like a military commando force, it recruited local fighters and was paid bounties, and human rights groups documented widespread killings and abuse of civilians. Koevoet is a clear case of a paramilitary police unit built for a colonial war rather than ordinary law enforcement. ## 24 March 1980 — El Salvador death squads and the killing of Archbishop Romero Right-wing death squads operating alongside El Salvador's security forces killed thousands during the country's civil war, including Archbishop Óscar Romero, shot while saying Mass in March 1980. The UN-backed Truth Commission in 1993 attributed the assassination to a plot linked to Roberto D'Aubuisson and found that death squads were tied to elements of the state. These findings belong to the Truth Commission, and some named figures denied involvement. ## c. 1981 — Guatemala's civil defense patrols During Guatemala's civil war the army organized rural men into Civil Defense Patrols, arming villagers and requiring them to police their own communities against suspected insurgents. The UN-sponsored truth commission later found that state forces and these patrols were responsible for the great majority of wartime killings, many against the Maya population. The patrols are a documented case of a state pushing armed control down to conscripted civilian militias. ## c. 1989 — The Civil Cooperation Bureau exposed in South Africa The Civil Cooperation Bureau was a covert unit of the apartheid South African Defence Force set up in the late 1980s to act against opponents of the state at home and abroad. Its existence and its links to assassinations were exposed by the Harms Commission and later detailed before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It stands as a documented example of a state running a clandestine armed unit outside the normal police and military structure. ## c. 1991 — Paramilitaries in the Balkan wars As Yugoslavia broke apart, armed volunteer units operated alongside regular forces, most infamously the Serb Volunteer Guard led by Željko Ražnatović, known as Arkan. These paramilitaries were tied to ethnic cleansing and massacres, and the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted Arkan for crimes against humanity before his 2000 killing. The war became a modern example of states using deniable irregular units to do what regular armies could not openly do. ## c. 1994 — The FIEP association of gendarmerie-style forces In 1994 the gendarmeries of France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal formed an association, later known by the initials FIEP, to coordinate forces that hold military status while doing police work. Membership grew to include the Netherlands, Turkey, and others, reflecting how many countries still keep a militarized police as a separate pillar. The body shows the gendarmerie tradition surviving as a distinct model of internal security into the present. ## c. 1997 — Colombia's paramilitary umbrella, the AUC In 1997 regional anti-guerrilla militias in Colombia joined into the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, a paramilitary federation that fought leftist rebels while funding itself through the drug trade. Investigations and later confessions under the Justice and Peace process documented massacres and links between paramilitary commanders and politicians, a scandal known as parapolitics. The AUC formally demobilized in the mid-2000s, though successor armed groups remained. ## c. 1997 — Militarization of American police and the 1033 program A federal program authorized in 1997, commonly called the 1033 program, let the Defense Department transfer surplus military equipment to local police, from rifles to armored vehicles. Combined with the spread of SWAT teams first developed in Los Angeles in the 1960s, it drew debate over whether American policing was taking on a military character. The 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, where police met protesters with military gear, brought the question of police militarization into wide public view. ## c. 1998 — Carabinieri and the rise of stability policing In the late 1990s Italy's Carabinieri pioneered Multinational Specialized Units in the Balkans, armed police formations deployed to fill the gap between soldiers and civilian police in peacekeeping zones. This role, often called stability policing, drew directly on the gendarmerie tradition of a force that can face both crowds and armed threats. It spread to NATO and EU missions and later informed the founding of a joint European Gendarmerie Force in 2004. ## 17 September 2004 — The European Gendarmerie Force established Five European Union countries with gendarmerie forces signed a declaration in 2004 to create a joint European Gendarmerie Force, headquartered in Vicenza, Italy. It was designed as a rapidly deployable armed police for crisis zones where a purely military or purely civilian force would not fit. The project is a modern institutional expression of the centuries-old gendarmerie idea of soldiers who police civilians. ## 12 December 2012 — Collusion findings in Northern Ireland inquiries Several official inquiries examined whether elements of the British state colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. The Stevens Inquiries reported findings of collusion in 2003, and the de Silva Review in 2012 concluded there were shocking levels of state collusion in the 1989 killing of solicitor Pat Finucane, though it found no overarching state conspiracy. These conclusions belong to the inquiries that made them, and the full extent of collusion remains contested and the subject of continuing legal challenge.