Police state

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File:Demonstranten in Amsterdam tegen Portugees optreden in Angola, Bestanddeelnr 915-3366.jpg
Demonstration in Amsterdam in 1963 against the police state (politiestaat) in Portuguese Angola during the Angolan War of Independence

A police state is a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little to no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are not exclusive to simply one-party states or dominant-party states, as they can also arise in a democracy or multi-party system.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities.[1] The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.[2] Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").[3]

History of usage

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the phrase "police state" back to 1851, when it was used in reference to the use of a national police force to maintain order in the Austrian Empire.[4] The German term Polizeistaat came into English usage in the 1930s with reference to totalitarian governments that had begun to emerge in Europe.[5]

Because there are different political perspectives as to what an appropriate balance is between individual freedom and national security, there are no objective standards defining a police state.[citation needed] This concept can be viewed as a balance or scale. Along this spectrum, any law that has the effect of removing liberty is seen as moving towards a police state while any law that limits government oversight of the populace is seen as moving towards a free state.[6]

An electronic police state is one in which the government aggressively uses electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.[7][8]

File:Baner NPD.JPG
"No to police state" banner in Ukraine

Early forms of police states can be found in ancient China. The rule of King Li of Zhou in the 9th century BCE featured strict censorship, extensive state surveillance, and frequent executions of those who were perceived to be speaking against the regime. During this reign of terror, ordinary people did not dare to speak to each other on the street, and only made eye contacts with friends as a greeting, hence known as '道路以目'[9]. During the 4th century BCE, the state of Qin introduced a registration system for its population, which initially collated the names of individuals, and later began keeping track of entire households.Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Footnotes/anchor_id_list' not found. Adapting a concept originally used within the military to society at-large, Qin households were organised into 'groups of five' (Template:Zhi), wherein the heads of each household were made mutually responsible for reporting any wrongdoing committed by other members of the group.Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Footnotes/anchor_id_list' not found.

Some have characterised the rule of King Henry VIII during the Tudor period as a police state.[10][11] The Oprichnina established by Tsar Ivan IV within the Russian Tsardom in 1565 functioned as a predecessor to the modern police state, featuring persecutions and autocratic rule.[12][13]

Nazi Germany emerged from an originally democratic government, yet gradually exerted more and more repressive controls over its people in the lead-up to World War II. In addition to the SS and the Gestapo, the Nazi police state used the judiciary to assert control over the population from the 1930s until the end of the war in 1945.[14]

During the period of apartheid, South Africa maintained police-state attributes such as banning people and organizations, arresting political prisoners, maintaining segregated living communities and restricting movement and access.[15]

Augusto Pinochet's Chile operated as a police state,[16] exhibiting "repression of public liberties, the elimination of political exchange, limiting freedom of speech, abolishing the right to strike, freezing wages".[17]

The Republic of Cuba under President (and later right-wing dictator) Fulgencio Batista was an authoritarian police state until his overthrow during the Cuban Revolution in 1959 with the rise to power of Fidel Castro and foundation of a Marxist-Leninist republic.[18][19][20][21]

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File:Hafez al-Assad official portrait (cropped).jpg
File:Bashar al-Assad (2018-05-17) 02 (cropped).jpg
Ba'athist Syria under Hafez al-Assad (r. 1971–2000) and his son Bashar al-Assad (r. 2000 – 2024) has been described as the most ruthless police state in the Arab World.

Following the failed July 1958 Haitian coup d'état attempt to overthrow the president, Haiti descended into an autocratic and despotic family dictatorship under the Haitian Vodou black nationalist François Duvalier (Papa Doc) and his National Unity Party. In 1959, Papa Doc ordered the creation of Tonton Macoutes, a paramilitary force unit whom he authorized to commit systematic violence and human rights abuses to suppress political opposition, including an unknown number of murders, public executions, rapes, disappearances of and attacks on dissidentsTemplate:Px2— an unrestrained state terrorism. In the 1964 Haitian constitutional referendum, he declared himself the president for life through a sham election. After Duvalier's death in 1971, his son Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) succeeded him as the next president for life, continuing the regime until the popular uprising that had him overthrown in February 1986.[citation needed]

Ba'athist Syria under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad was described[by whom?] as the most "ruthless police state" in the Arab world, with a tight system of restrictions on the movement of civilians, independent journalists and other unauthorized individuals. Alongside North Korea and Eritrea, it operated one of the strictest censorship machines that regulated the transfer of information. The Syrian security apparatus was established in the 1970s by Hafez al-Assad, who ran a military dictatorship with the Ba'ath party as its civilian cover to enforce the loyalty of Syrian populations to the Assad family. The Mukhabarat was given free hand to terrorise, torture or murder non-compliant civilians, while public activities of any organized opposition was curbed down with the raw firepower of the army. Bashar and his family were overthrown in December 2024 during the Syrian Revolution with the Fall of the Assad regime and the Fall of Damascus which had forced Bashar to leave Syria for Russia and its capital Moscow for political asylum.[22][23]

North Korea is claimed to have elements of a police state, from the Juche-style Silla kingdom,[24] to the imposition of a fascist police state by the Japanese,[24] to the totalitarian police state imposed and maintained by the Kim family.[25]

Afghanistan became a police state as well as pervasive surveillance state under the Taliban, since returning to power after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban's secret police organization known as the GDI as the regime's efforts to enforce a totalitarian interpretation of Sharia law and eliminate dissent by the new government of the newly established "Islamic Emirate".

In response to government proposals to enact new security measures to curb protests, the AKP-led government of Turkey has been accused of turning Turkey into a police state.[26] Since the 2013 removal of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi from office, the government of Egypt has carried out extensive efforts to suppress certain forms of Islamism and religious extremism (including the aforementioned Muslim Brotherhood),[27][better source needed] leading to accusations that it has effectively become a "revolutionary police state".[28][29]

The USSR was a police state.[30] Notable secret police forces in the former USSR were the Cheka, the NKVD, and the KGB. Tools of state control used by the Soviet Union include censorship, forced labour under the Gulag system of labour camps,[31] and deportation and genocide of ethnic minorities such as in the Holodomor, NKVD Order No. 00485 against the Poles and De-Cossackization.[32] Modern-day Russia[33][34] and Belarus are often described as police states.[35][36]

The dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos from the 1970s to early 1980s in the Philippines had many characteristics of a police state.[37][38]

Hong Kong is perceived by some human rights organizations and press to have implemented the tools of a police state after passing the National Security legislation in 2020, following repeated attempts by People's Republic of China to erode the rule of law in the former British colony.[39][40][41][42][43]

The United States has been described as a police state since the reelection of President Donald Trump in 2024, particularly due to the mass detention of activists—including green card holders such as Mahmoud Khalil—and immigrants without due process or transparency, alongside unidentified ICE detentions.[44]

Several analysts noted that Mexico underwent a shift toward a police state following the approval of a telecommunications law in 2025. The legislation required the creation of a user registry that includes real-time geolocation data, and the modification of the Unique Population Registry Code (CURP) to include biometric data. These data must be provided by government agencies and private companies that already possess them, and using the CURP would be required to access telephone, cable, and internet services, as well as to make online purchases and travel. Additionally, the government approved the elimination of checks and balances such as the National Institute of Transparency for Access to Information and Personal Data Protection and the Federal Telecommunications Institute. Also, the government was granted the authority to access citizens' phone calls and to censor media content it deems inappropriate or harmful to audiences. Further, although the National Guard was originally created to be under civilian command, its transfer to the military, under full control of the Secretariat of National Defense, was approved.[45]

Fictional police states

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Fictional police states have featured in media ranging from novels to films to video games. George Orwell's novel 1984 describes Britain under the totalitarian Oceanian regime that continuously invokes (and helps to cause) a perpetual war. This perpetual war is used as a pretext for subjecting the people to mass surveillance and invasive police searches. This novel was described by The Encyclopedia of Police Science as "the definitive fictional treatment of a police state, which has also influenced contemporary usage of the term".[46]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Tipton, Elise K. (17 December 2013). The Japanese Police State: Tokko in Interwar Japan. A&C Black. pp. 14–. ISBN 9781780939742. Retrieved 5 September 2014.
  2. ^ A Dictionary of World History, Market House Books, Oxford University Press, 2000.
  3. ^ The Police State, Chapman, B., Government and Opposition, Vol.3:4, 428–440, (2007). Accessible online at [1], retrieved 15 August 2008.
  4. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, Third edition, January 2009; online version November 2010. [2]; accessed 19 January 2011. [dead link]
  5. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Dubber, Markus Dirk; Valverde, Mariana (2006). The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5392-0.
  6. ^ Police State (Key Concepts in Political Science), Brian Chapman, Macmillan, 1971.
  7. ^ "Police Checkpoints on the Information Highway", Computer underground Digest, Volume 6 : Issue 72 (14 August 1994), Script error: No such module "CS1 identifiers"., "The so-called 'electronic frontier' is quickly turning into an electronic police state."
  8. ^ The Electronic Police State: 2008 National Rankings, by Jonathan Logan, Cryptohippie USA.
  9. ^ "dào lù yǐ mù", "The roads have eyes"
  10. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Henry VIII: Henry the horrible". The Independent. 12 October 2003.
  11. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Human truth in the Tudor police state". Financial Times. 28 September 2006.
  12. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Gella, Aleksander (1989). Development of Class Structure in Eastern Europe: Poland and Her Southern Neighbors. SUNY Press. p. 217. ISBN 9780887068331. Retrieved 20 August 2016. Oprichnina was originally a band of faithful servants organized by Ivan IV into a police force; they were used by the tsar to crush not only all boyars (Russian nobility) under suspicion, but also the Russian princes [...]. Oprichnina enabled the tsars to build the first police state in modem history.
  13. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Wilson, Colin (1964). Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs. New York, Farrar, Straus. p. 60. Retrieved 20 August 2016. [Ivan IV] established a political security force to run the Oprichina[sic], whose task was to spy on his enemies and destroy them; hence Ivan may be regarded as the inventor of the police state.
  14. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."SS Police State". U.S. Holocaust Museum. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  15. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Cooper, Frederick (10 October 2002). Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge University Press. pp. 149–. ISBN 9780521776004. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  16. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Zwier, Paul J. (22 April 2013). Principled Negotiation and Mediation in the International Arena: Talking with Evil. Cambridge University Press. pp. 235–. ISBN 9781107026872. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  17. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Casanova, Pablo González (1 January 1993). Latin America Today. United Nations University Press. pp. 233–. ISBN 9789280808193. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  18. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Candelaria, Cordelia; García, Peter J.; Aldama, Arturo J. (2004). Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 120–. ISBN 9780313332104. Retrieved 27 March 2014.
  19. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Bailey, Helen Miller; Cruz, Frank H. (1 January 1972). The Latin Americans: Past and Present. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9780395133736. Retrieved 27 March 2014.
  20. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Novas, Himilce (27 November 2007). Everything You Need to Know About Latino History: 2008 Edition. Penguin Group US. pp. 225–. ISBN 9781101213537. Retrieved 27 March 2014.
  21. ^ Paul H. Lewis. Authoritarian regimes in Latin America.
  22. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Bowen, Jeremy (2013). "Prologue: Before the Spring". The Arab Uprisings: The People Want the Fall of the Regime. Simon & Schuster. pp. 14, 15, 51, 118, 210–214, 336, 341. ISBN 9781471129827.
  23. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."RSF". RSF: Reporters Without Borders. Retrieved 7 May 2020.
  24. ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Becker, Jasper (1 May 2005). Rogue Regime : Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. Oxford University Press. pp. 74–. ISBN 9780198038108. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  25. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Hixson, Walter L. (2008). The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy. Yale University Press. pp. 179–. ISBN 9780300150131. Retrieved 22 March 2014.
  26. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Critics: Proposed Legislation Turns Turkey Into Police State". VOA. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  27. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Egypt: The politics of reforming al-Azhar".
  28. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Khorshid, Sara (16 November 2014). "Egypt's New Police State". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 May 2016.
  29. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Egypt: The Revolutionary Police State". Politico. Retrieved 20 May 2016.
  30. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Brooks, Christopher (28 December 2024). "Chapter 12: The Soviet Union and the Cold War – Western Civilization: A Concise History". pressbooks.nscc.ca. Archived from the original on 28 December 2024. Retrieved 23 April 2025.
  31. ^ Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum, 2003, Template:ISBN
  32. ^ "Revelations from the Russian Archives" Library of Congress, 1997
  33. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Taylor, Brian D. (18 May 2014). "From Police State to Police State? Legacies and Law Enforcement in Russia". In Beissinger, Mark; Kotkin, Stephen (eds.). Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Cambridge University Press. pp. 128–151. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107286191.007. ISBN 9781107054172.
  34. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Russia's police state showed its real face in latest protest crackdown". New Eastern Europe - A bimonthly news magazine dedicated to Central and Eastern European affairs. 11 April 2021.
  35. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Belarus: a police state in action". OSW Centre for Eastern Studies. 16 November 2020.
  36. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Higgins, Andrew; Santora, Marc (16 November 2021). "Cold and Marooned in a Police State as Desperation Takes Hold". The New York Times.
  37. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Marcos Orders Crackdown On Critics of Martial Law - The Washington Post". The Washington Post. 8 April 1978. Archived from the original on 14 June 2020.
  38. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Karnow, Stanley (19 March 1989). "REAGAN AND THE PHILIPPINES: Setting Marcos Adrift". The New York Times.
  39. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Vines, Stephen (3 July 2021). "What's wrong with Hong Kong becoming a police state?". Hong Kong Free Press HKFP. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  40. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Welle (www.dw.com), Deutsche. "Amnesty: Hong Kong on course to becoming 'police state' | DW | 30.06.2021". DW.COM. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  41. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Rogers, Benedict (30 May 2022). "Hong Kong's thuggish new leader epitomises its descent into a police state". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  42. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Opinion: Make no mistake – this new security law turns Hong Kong into a Chinese police state". The Independent. 1 July 2020. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  43. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Hong Kong's New Police State". thediplomat.com. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  44. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Gessen, M. (2 April 2025). "Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
  45. ^ As stated by multiple sources:
  46. ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Greene, Jack R. (2007). The Encyclopedia of Police Science. Vol. 1 (3 ed.). Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-97000-6.

Works cited

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Wikiquote has quotations related to Police state.

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