A Latin American Army? The Politics of Military Policing in Italy

The literature on Italian post-Cold War military policy has focused mainly on external deployments, overlooking the use of the military for domestic security. Since the 1990s, the Army has been regularly deployed in support of the police, often exceeding overseas missions. By using elite interviews, parliamentary debates and media sources, an analysis of military policing between 1992 and 2024 reveals that the emergence and persistence of this practice stems from the interaction between political demand for internal security and fiscal constraints limiting police expansion. Over time, repeated deployments generated path dependence, increasing the costs of withdrawal. By shifting attention from overseas operations to domestic deployments, the article highlights a largely overlooked but fundamental dimension of Italian defence policy and explains the mechanisms that have sustained it over time.