Everyday Practices in Dealing with Cross-Border Crime: Some Insights from Conversation Analysis

Abstract

By approaching border security as a form of social interaction, the aim of this research is to provide a more thorough consideration of the how in the everyday communicative practices of police officers and civilians who participate in crime control at borders. Employing a corpus of 272 videos of police checks carried out by the Spanish Guardia Civil at La Jonquera–Le Perthus (the Spain–France border area), conversation analysis (CA) is introduced and applied as a novel perspective in the field of border security studies. From this approach, this article scrutinizes how meaningful actions emerge, and their relevance to the development of the encounter. The analysis highlights how certain actions can be consequential for police checks, such as initiating and modifying turns in conversation to overcome problematic situations that arise, for example, from the (non) ownership of the stopped vehicle, or the (lack of) reason for stopping it, which interfere with the police agenda in the management of border security (i.e., the resolution of suspicion). Consequently, this article sheds light on the role of CA in promoting analyses of micro-level border practices, allowing for the detailed examination of how border encounters are locally managed.