New Cluster at the Public-Private Platform

Law Enforcement and Armed Forces Cluster

As with other PPP clusters,  LEAF (Law enforcement and Armed Forces) would  function as a ‘shared space’ for research, teaching and dissemination of activities related to police and military organisations, and to questions about the organisation of security within society. This type of organisation is, all at once, both very typical of and different from organisations in general; this is precisely what makes them fascinating and highly relevant as a topic of study. They are typical because they fundamentally highlight issues like control, coordination, accountability and culture that are common to all organisations. Yet, they are also profoundly unique because of the nature of work that gets done within them. This featured inherent tasks, risks and means that are immensely rare, including the monopoly of violence and the projection of lethal force – most often on behalf of the state, but increasingly also on behalf of non-state actors.

The two cluster facilitators Mia Hartmann and Rasmus Koss Hartmann state that police and military organisations are in the midst of change, both in government and increasingly also in private firms offering security as a service with new tasks, organisations and challenges of governing emerging in Western societies and across the globe.

The cluster wishes to examine these tensions through a range of interrelated organisational topics – change, control, risk, culture, leadership, ethics, diversity, social responsibility and innovation – as well as societal questions relating to the role of the state, political organisations and the privatisation of security.

The two facilitators Rasmus and Mia state that with the LEAF cluster they hope to create a platform that can unite and inspire research within diverse aspects of law enforcement and armed forces. Besides this, they hope to aspire to foster and facilitate knowledge creation, urgent debates, and education across academia and practice and hereby create an open and vital environment for engaging with the fast-growing and fast-changing sphere of public and private security in its national and cross-national constellations.

The Platform encourages all CBS researches already working or interested in this area to join the new cluster. If there is an interest in joining the cluster please contact the PP Platform at publicprivateplatform@cbs.dk

Read more about the cluster and its members here.