The Logic of Hard Coercion Enforcement: Militarisation and the Reconfiguration of Democratic Sanctioning

This article argues that militarisation transforms the logic of sanctioning in democratic policing, producing conditions under which coercion undermines rather than secures compliance. Prevailing deterrence models assume that expanding coercive capacity increases compliance by raising the expected costs of non-compliance. Yet growing empirical evidence suggests the opposite: escalating coercion can provoke defiance, backlash, and violence.I theorise militarised sanctioning as a shift from procedurally mediated punishment to immediate and discretionary forms of hard coercion. Under these conditions, coercive encounters are more likely to be perceived as illegitimate and interpreted within a loss frame, encouraging risk-acceptant responses rather than compliance. Integrating insights from deterrence theory, procedural justice, prospect theory, and defiance theory, the framework specifies the institutional and psychological mechanisms linking extreme coercion to behavioural backlash.The article develops a behavioural backlash model in which reactions to coercive enforcement—such as resistance, mobilisation, or violence—are recoded by political actors as evidence of renewed threat, thereby legitimising further coercive expansion. Militarisation thus generates a self-reinforcing feedback cycle in which deterrence failure is endogenous rather than anomalous. By reframing coercion as a mode of governance rather than a simple instrument of deterrence, the article identifies the conditions under which expanding coercive capacity produces insecurity instead of compliance.