This paper examines the use of military intelligence in aid of the civil power in England and Wales. The use of military intelligence domestically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a significant part of British intelligence history, although it has not received the attention that British military intelligence abroad in defence of the Empire or in conventional wars has. An examination of the domestic role of military intelligence also highlights the extent to which commanders were developing some of the principles of military intelligence before any formal doctrine was devised.

This article examines state crime in the area of the use of irregulars in counterinsurgency. Irregulars are defined as local units who receive rudimentary training and act alongside more regular forces. They are also defined as more regular formal local units who act informally (and often unlawfully) as part of their counter-insurgency role (e.g. death squads). The article examines the important role that such irregulars have played in counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and highlights the human rights violations that their use has encouraged. This area is an important area for future research.

This article examines the debates which have taken place again recently concerning the long-standing idea of a plot in the 1970s against the elected Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Two television programmes in 2006 and Christopher Andrew’s 2009 official history of the UK Security Service (MI5) discussed the plot. Andrew’s history dismissed the possibility of a conspiracy out of hand. This article critiques this approach and also discusses the continuing power of ideas of right wing plotting against Wilson. The plots remain an interesting and unresolved debate in contemporary intelligence history.

Four murder cases in Guatemala and El Salvador, two from the period of conflict, two following democratisation. But all show similar patterns. The violence meted out to the female victims is sustained and visceral. The photographs of the dead display appalling injuries inflicted both before and after death and the marks of sexual torture speak of a hatred and disgust for women and girls in the minds of the perpetrators.

Why should democratisation in some countries be associated with an increase in violence, both from civil society and the state? This appears to be counter-intuitive since in our general political imagination, according to the tenets of modernisation theory and in the light of specific examples such as democracy following civil war, we would expect democracy to be associated with more peaceful means of dampening social conflict. However, the patterns of democratisation, particularly following the Cold War, have demonstrated that democracies may be associated with violence.

This chapter should be read in conjunction with the other chapters in this book, particularly those dealing with new spaces for crime, political corruption and economic liberalisation. As the quotes above imply it argues that organised crime should be treated, not in fantastical terms, but as a form of power often well integrated into the political economy of any nation. Organised crime is frequently seen as an alien entity (particularly if bound up with notions of organised crime groups characterised by their ethnicity) and almost separate from social relations. This was the case when the first notions of organised crime conspiracies were popularised in the US1 and also in the fevered years after the end of communism in Europe when — in a process now well documented by critical scholars2 — politicians, security and intelligence agencies, think tanks, academics, the media and some civil society groups rushed to declare organised crime as a new and apocalyptic threat to nations, regions and even the globe, often encapsulated in the term transnational organised crime.3 In 1995 one of the pioneer scholars of the threat from transnational organised crime stated: 'Long term neglect of this problem [of organised crime] means that the world now faces highly developed criminal organisations that undermine the rule of law, international security and the world economy and which, if they are allowed to continue unimpeded, could threaten the concept of the nation-state'4.

This chapter examines the way in which democratisation may facilitate crime and corruption. If, as Villareal argues, more attention should be taken of the way political change impacts on crime we need to specify the links which may be made between democracy and crime. This includes examining the factors directly linked to democratisation which may lead to crime and those factors which may be associated with but not reducible to democracy. It should also be noted that this does not explain the crime or corruption since the structural opportunities created for crime need to be taken by agents (individuals and organisations). We also have to look at how democracies may respond to this new crime and may themselves engage in unlawful acts while being 'tough' on crime. However this 'cycle of democratic violence' is the subject of Chapter 5.

When we speak of ‘Iraq’ certain words or terms spring to mind: anarchy, lawlessness, violence, sectarianism, bodycount or Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’.1 However political violence and crime in Iraq adhered to clear rules of social logic. The ‘war of all against all’ did not occur.2 Authority did appear quite quickly but from multiple places. The sources of power included the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the Green Zone then, following the transfer of power, the weak Iraqi government, Shia militias, Sunni militias and rejuvenated tribal authority In part Iraq began to resemble African ‘warlord’ states as documented by Reno and de Waal in which the violence followed clear lines of rationality since the ‘market’ for conflict resolution was skewed against making a permanent deal.3 The statelet with the most coercive force in Iraq was the CPA government, in operation from 2003–04, and its successor the Iraqi government (heavily influenced by the US as a form of shadow government). Using the US military it intimidated the Mehdi Army, faced down the insurgents in Falluja in 2004 and effectively terminated al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as a threat to the state in 2007–08 (after thinking politically and co-opting local forces). But from the start it never had a monopoly of violence and it could not provide public security and basic services. As most observers have pointed out this was central to subsequent political development in Iraq.