In Europe, as in other parts of the world, private security officers have become regular actors in order maintenance in public spaces since the 1990s, next to the police. In some countries, such as Belgium and The Netherlands, this development is accompanied by an increased legal mandate for private security officers.

A hunger strike is a political act. It is, more specifically, the political act of someone whose voice has been excluded from the political realm.

The recent revelations in the Guardian by Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues about the mass surveillance operations of the US intelligence community (IC) have brought unusual attention to government activities that typically operate in conditions of extreme secrecy.

A frequent observation is that in the post-9/11 U.S., the police are becoming increasingly militarized, adopting military strategies, tactics and technologies to monitor the citizenry and control crime and disorder, and that this newly militarized policing poses a formidable threat to democracy. Certainly, a question at the heart of the relationship between the military and the domestic police force in modern democracies concerns the tenuousness of the distinction between them.