War came to Iran despite its declared neutrality. Ottoman and Russian forces attacked or occupied the northern regions, while Britain expanded its control in the south. The young king, Ahmad Shah, was ill-equipped to rule as rival political leaders emerged. American missionaries documented the devastation of war as Iran suffered from famine and the influenza epidemic. The conclusion of World War I did not bring much support to Iran as its concerns were rebuffed at the Congress of Versailles. A coup brought political change and the end of Qajar rule. The military commander Reza Khan positioned himself as the new leader of Iran, even after the political defeat of the republican movement. Tribal disarmament and state control followed the end of war and the rise of a new monarchy. After the war America considered new opportunities for involvement in Iran.

This chapter maps the emergence and development of the police as part of the Jordanian state’s institutional infrastructure. Starting with a brief overview of policing in early Muslim societies and policing in Transjordan under the Ottoman Empire, the chapter then focuses on the organisational development of the police (in towns and the countryside) within the Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha and the British Mandate until the separation of the police from the military in 1956 and the creation of the Public Security Directorate (PSD). The discussion of various police roles within the Legion indicates that while coercion featured prominently in the early days of the state, the police were concerned not only with ‘repression’ or ‘law-enforcement’, but also with social ordering. The chapter’s second section highlights and seeks to make sense of a series of seeming paradoxes within the contemporary PSD relating to ideas about it as a civic service or a quasi-military force, as a guardian of conservativism, and/or a heralder of modernity; and as being at once ubiquitous and /or ‘laissez-faire’.