Mette Volquartzen

Current research

The keywords to my research are: police law, plural policing, predictive policing, police history, use of force, private security, methodology, interdisciplinary studies and methods.

In my current research I examine the joint operations between the military and the police during the period 1971-2018. An important change made to the Danish Police Act on July 1th 2018 (Lov nr. 708) defined for the first time explicitly the governance of military assistance to the police and has been identified as a paradigm shift from very rare, temporary occurrences of assistance from the armed forces to a much more permanent condition of domestic militarization. Futhermore the political agreement for the Danish Defense 2018-2023 explicitly states that the level of support from the military to the police is expected to increase in the near future. Together these changes mark a pivotal moment in the development of Danish internal security policy and practice, which calls for historical analysis and contemporary interpretation from a military, police science and legal perspective. The project is based on a unique access to classified sources and interviews with central actors.

The project is supported by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond and is carried out in a collaboration between the Center for International Law, Conflict and Crisis (CILCC) and the Department of Military History, Cultural Understanding and War Theory (IMK) at the Defense Academy (FAK). The research project is managed by Professor Jens Elo Rytter (CILCC) and the defense-historical part of the project is provided by Assistant Professor Rasmus Dahlberg (FAK IMK).