Outlook and Conclusions

The findings of this work enabled to corroborate the initial assumptions and yielded a series of significant insights and lessons for the theory on democratization and praxis of police reforms. First of all, the empirical tests of the cases examined under the theoretical and methodological approach underpinning this work largely confirmed the two central hypotheses: On the one hand, police counter-reform works gradually through the systemic activation of the mechanisms of politicization, militarization and informalization of policing. Responsible for this is the intentional action by incumbents, senior public officials and top police managers, who set this process in motion due to political calculations, as police counter-reform serves the strategic goals of cooptation of the police, enhancing their capacity to exert repression and broadening informal social control over citizens’ lives geared toward the consolidation and stabilization of semi- or fully authoritarian forms of political rule.