Protecting Populations: Military Officers Navigating Boundaries Between Soldiering and Policing

This paper explores how military officers interpret responsibilities for protecting civilian populations in volatile environments. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Norwegian military officers, the study examines how officers invoke and contest security references to justify their roles at the intersection of soldiering and policing. Two opposing orientations emerge; one reinforces traditional security constructs to differentiate military and police roles, grounded in binaries including war/peace, internal/external threats, the use/the avoidance of force, and war/crime jurisprudence; the other frames policing as a legitimate extension of military duties, challenging established boundaries and prioritizing contextual flexibility. The analysis draws on sociological theories of boundary-making and the scholarship on civil-military relations and security governance to discuss how categorical distinctions may shape operational decisions. Boundary-making emerges as a cognitive strategy that simplifies complexity but risks reactive rather than proactive responses to civilians under attack. As modern conflicts increasingly involve populations, militaries face mounting pressure to reconcile traditional warfighting roles with broader societal protection mandates. The study calls for further research into how boundary-making logics and competing governance models influence operational decisions and civil-military relations in practice.