About Us

The Critical Police Studies Network (CPSN) is a collaborative platform for researchers working on policing and accountability across European democracies and beyond. For us, critical policing studies means examining policing not as a neutral function of democratic governance but as a seat of power shaped by historical, political and social forces. We are interested in how policing practices are racialised and gendered, how police power is expanding through surveillance technologies and militarisation  and how oversight institutions struggle to ensure accountability. At the same time, we explore how communities, movements and civil society actors contest and reshape policing from below. We draw on diverse theoretical traditions, from political sociology, critical legal studies and democratic theory, to feminist, decolonial and abolitionist analyses. We work with a range of methods, including ethnography, legal analysis, comparative case studies and quantitative approaches.