Introduction

This introductory chapter outlines the book’s research problem, its significance, and how the volume addresses it. It begins by documenting the post-Cold War trend towards increased domestic use of the armed forces for internal security in advanced democracies, arguing that this constitutes both a theoretical puzzle and a policy challenge. It then shows that existing scholarship—developed mainly in Latin America—travels poorly to Europe, where it struggles to explain cross-national variation. It then outlines the book’s approach: a party-centred framework designed to account for this variation, tested through a deviant case study of Italy (1992-2024) and complemented by an exploratory comparison.