Research Brief
International policing operations are commonly labelled under the broad headings of either ‘executive authority policing’ or ‘SMART policing’, according to the type of authority conferred by the mandate authorising the operation. In executive authority policing, the overseas police deployed assumes full responsibility for law enforcement and is mandated with the full range of police powers. On the other hand, the more common SMART policing refers to an operation that is confined to the tasks of ‘Supervising’, ‘Monitoring’, ‘Advising’, ‘Reporting’ and ‘Training’. While these classifications provide a basic understanding of the types of tasks undertaken by civilian police in peace operations, they fail to provide a nuanced way of capturing the wide range of tasks involved and the desired outcome of those tasks. The purpose of this research is to address this deficiency by repackaging the way in which policing operations are distinguished.
The proposed typology will be based upon the overarching purpose of the police mission as evident in its mandate and will further differentiate according to the situation surrounding the police component, the size and composition of the component and the phase of the mission at which it is deployed. In its completed form, the mission typology will briefly review different ways of distinguishing between missions; it will set out and justify the typology in detail and provide brief case study examples of each of the different types – as well as covering sub-types (i.e. Missions which share a common
purpose but differ in one or more of the other aspects).