Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies and Researcher in gender and security at King's College London 

Speaker: Dr Francisco Mazzola, Visiting Lecturer in International relations and Security Studies at City, University of London

Community policing is often praised as a fix to ‘broken’ policing, both in and beyond the "West". After all, its advocates present it as a proactive policing approach to improve police-citizen relations and empower citizens to help the police fight crime and hold it accountable.

As appealing as these objectives may sound, policing is a political endeavour by the state to preserve the social and political status quo. This conceptual tension alone hints at the actual state-centric nature of community policing and casts doubts on the potential of community policing, and perhaps police reform at large, to improve human security.

Dr Francisco Mazzola examines the impact of community policing on human security in Lebanon since 2008. He argues that despite its supposedly human-centric objectives, community policing is typical of the dominant discourse on policing in state-building which in practice often favours state security over human security, and facilities authoritarian tendencies in the Lebanese state.

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About the speaker

Dr Francisco Mazzola holds a PhD in War Studies from King's College London and currently teaches IR and Security Studies at City, University of London. His main research interests are security assistance in post-conflict settings, civil-security and police-military relations, and statehood ‘beyond the West’.

In his next project he will compare cases in Latin America to further develop his critique of conventional Euro-centric assumptions on non-state actors as the source of ‘weakness’ in post-colonial states.