Transnational Policing Research Articles

Tackling Maritime Security in the Gulf of Guinea: Interactions Between Global Shipping and Ghanaian State Agents

ABSTRACT Maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea is a challenge that straddles multiple players and sectors, and crimes like piracy cause disruptions to international trade and shipping. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the global shipping industry tried to keep maritime security on the agenda, while advocating for global security assemblages, specifically, transnational policing initiatives as part of the maritime security governance. Using the notion of narratives and assemblage thinking, it is argued that although global shipping and Ghanaian state agents agree on the problem, they differ on which maritime security governance infrastructure to deploy, resulting in tensions between the two parties.

Do National Differences Hamper CSDP? The Pragmatism of Mission Members

European police officers’ work in the context of multinational police missions is an important component of international peace- and statebuilding. However, so far little is known about the inner life of police work in such missions. Existing research suggests that difficulties arise when police from countries with different policing models participate in the same mission. Focusing on public order policing and drawing on interviews with European police officers working in Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions of the European Union, our findings offer a more nuanced picture. Even though distinctly national styles continue to inform public order practices (trends of convergence notwithstanding), European members of multinational missions are not critical of differing approaches per se and even appreciate cross-national variation as it provides a range of options. However, their pragmatism also leads mission members to be critical towards practices they regard as not fitting local conditions in mission areas or as lacking proper planning. European Union, CSDP, police missions, transnational policing, European Foreign and Security Policy, pragmatism, public order, protest policing

Detecting the Asian cop: policing and the incorporation of Asian Americans into American empire

ABSTRACT In 2016, the trial of Peter Liang for murdering Akai Gurley galvanized a charged debate among Asian Americans; some defended Liang as a victim of racial profiling, while others in solidarity against anti-Black violence argued for his conviction as a police officer. Many have viewed this trial as an example of increasing conservatism among Asian Americans, yet what does the specific figure of the Asian cop reveal about Asian American support for policing? Working through a theoretical reinterpretation of Liang’s trial, I argue that policing acts as the material process for the incorporation of Asian Americans as subjects of American empire as long as they are willing to police in its interests. Through a transpacific lens that connects domestic anti-Black policing to the policing of militarized spaces in Asia, I show how the unique and uneven incorporation of Asian peoples through American policing produces the contemporary terrain of political struggle over such topics as hate crime legislation and abolition. By recognizing how transnational policing incorporates Asians as American subjects, this structural analysis complements attitudinal studies of Asian American politics to show how Asian American activists either reject or reproduce their alliance with the American state’s police power.

Imagining Digital Data: Policing and Social Media Intelligence

Our assumptions, beliefs and expectations about digital data shape how we use them to govern organizations and societal affairs. In this article, we conceptualise the role of digital data through the concept of digital imaginaries. Building on studies of policing and digital media, we develop a framework for examining the use of digital imaginaries in contemporary policing efforts. We draw on documentary research on Europol and demonstrate how digital imaginaries are put to work in transnational policing. We identify the articulation of two main digital imaginaries: (i) an imaginary of agency, and (ii) an imaginary of prophetic data. We show how such digital imaginaries operate as tools that can be wielded for good or for evil, and we discuss their underlying assumptions around human agency as well as the politics of platform technology and temporality in policing.

Plural Policing in Papua New Guinea: More Than the Sum of Its Parts?

Scholars increasingly acknowledge that policing involves multiple actors and diverse institutional arrangements. Although the global expansion of private security has prompted much of the current interest in plural policing in the Global North, relatively little attention has been paid to this phenomenon in the Global South despite the manifestly plural character of policing in many such countries. This article examines plural policing in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the Southwest Pacific. Policing in PNG involves a bewildering array of different actors and institutional forms, ranging from transnational police to unofficial urban settlement committees. Investigating the shifting pattern of pluralization in the context of broader structural changes and the intersections between different providers illuminates how policing actually works in this socially diverse nation, as well as highlighting some of its implications for state and society in this understudied part of the world.

Transnational policing between national political regimes and human rights norms: The case of the Interpol Red Notice system

Current transnational policing mechanisms such as Interpol appear to reproduce authoritarianism-like actions in democratic contexts by helping to undermine the rights and freedoms of individuals targeted by non-democratic regimes. Through an in depth examination of the cases of Turkish and Russian police, this article seeks to explain the possible motives of the law enforcement institutions of democratic states in executing the questionable Interpol Red Notice requests by authoritarian regimes based on the existing theoretical debates in the literature on international policing. It explores three factors that foster policing cooperation between democratic and authoritarian states: 1) an aspired depoliticization of international policing that facilitates cooperation among states with different national and ideological outlooks; 2) an occupational culture that encourages professional support and solidarity among policing agents that transcends national rivalries; and 3) state cooperation against threats posed by the planning and conduct of international crime.

Assembling Transnational Policing: Europol’s Anticipatory Governance

ABSTRACT Building on studies of transnational policing, security and digitization, we develop an assemblage-theoretical framework to explore perceptions of time in contemporary policing efforts. We use the concepts of techno imaginaries and policing assemblage to examine the articulation of temporality and multi-scalar connections between humans and non-humans in policing, which has become increasingly pluralised and digitised. We draw on documentary research on Europol to analyse anticipatory governance in transnational police work, including the linkages between humans and machines and identify a shift from post-crime towards pre-crime interventions. We critically discuss the significance of this shift for the character and robustness of expected future risks and threat assessments. Our reflections on the interplay between time and techno imaginaries contribute to critical analyses of the ways in which decision-making and interventions shape and are shaped by transnational assemblages in anticipatory governance.

Транснациональная полицейская деятельность современных государств в условиях глобализации

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the transnational police activity of modern states. The objectives of the study are to analyze how the political reactions to the globalization of the social order influenced the structure and scope of the police activities, its organizational culture, priorities and processes. Author analyses the key stockholders in the international police cooperation, the role of non-commercial organizations, the methods of interaction in the field of combating organized crime, cyber-crime, illegal migration and other international offences, as well as police functions in the spheres of peace and safety maintenance in the post-war zones, peacemaking support, reaction to transnational emergencies and the search for missing people abroad. In the course of the study, the author concludes that even though the idea of an international police force has a long history, it only became a reality under the auspices of the United Nations Organization in the 1960s. A powerful global police structure has been created. Common databases and common police guidelines guarantee an interaction and joint investigation activities in all continental regions. Despite the fact that the necessity of the international cooperation is obvious, the creation of the successful scheme for such an interaction is still a challenging issue. Legal and political systems, standards, procedures related to justice vary in different countries. Local police forces possess varying levels of competence and budget in order to support activities ensuring the national security.

Everyday Police Work Abroad: A Story of Experience, Continuity and Change in Multilateral Missions

ABSTRACT Nowadays, police officers are regularly deployed as members of multilateral peace operations. This article examines how these experts implement their mandates and how we can understand their activities. For this, we draw on a set of 90 semi-structured interviews with European police experts who have experience in multilateral policing. We find that, to navigate their work abroad, European police officers primarily rely on their own domestic policing experience, their experience from previous deployments and the experience of colleagues they meet in the mission. The extent to which they can rely on their own experience is shaped by how much discretion they find at their disposal. We identify two conditions limiting their discretion: the preferences, policies and histories of host states, and institutional lock-in effects within missions that reduce officers’ room to manoeuvre over time. While we also find that officers do not normally draw on international guidance documents in their everyday work, missions can nevertheless be regarded as sites where more localized transnational policing practices emerge. These mission-specific transnational practices are formed, over time, by successive cohorts of police officers from different countries.

Policing and planning cross-border surveillance during the cold war. The South Tyrolean case

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the organisation and plans for cross-border police surveillance during the 1960s and 1970s in the key border area of South Tyrol, in Northern Italy. At a time when political and ethno-nationalist terrorism appeared, the threats it posed took on an international character. This study seeks to understand the re-organisation of police surveillance and the militarisation of borders in peacetime, investigating continuities and ruptures in the history of policing in Republican Italy; it focuses on the exchange of knowledge between security experts and the transformation of organisation and practices of police officers with the task of monitoring borders. This leads on to propose conceptual reflections on the formats, effects and boundary-setting in transnational police actions, as well as on the spaces of interaction between transnational actors in the recent past. Which of these are devices of police border surveillance? How were areas of competence assigned to different Public Security bodies? What did they represent for the history of the police of Republican Italy? How was cross-border surveillance negotiated and how was it organised? How did the exchange of knowledge develop police cooperation and how did this influence diplomatic relations between Italy and Austria during the cold War? Cross-border surveillance took on an important role in the relations between states in negotiating areas of surveillance and legitimate competencies. This study is based on unpublished documents created by the Ufficio Affari Riservati (U.A.R.) of the Italian Ministry of the Interior, which make it possible to reconstruct an organisation chart of the civilian and military corps engaged at the border and to investigate the cross-border Italian–Austrian police cooperation in its theoretical and technical-scientific aspects.

The Role of the UN International Drug Control Conventions in Facilitating Law Enforcement Cooperation in the Policing of Transnational Drug Trafficking

Transnational policing is an increasingly important issue in today’s globalised world. Transnational crime is an expanding industry and when crime crosses borders, cooperation between states is key. Arguably, this is most important in illegal drug trafficking, a crime of high concern to many states which almost always involves multiple countries. To this end, the UN Drug Control Conventions, introduced to tackle drug trafficking across the world, contain a number of provisions regarding law enforcement cooperation. This piece, by examining legal instruments and existing literature, will explore the role of the conventions regarding cooperation in policing the transnational trafficking of illicit drugs with a particular focus on the US, a major player in the field. Law enforcement cooperation between states existed for many years without international law obligations, however, it was often plagued by political and cultural differences and suffered when international relations were tense. By implementing obligations within the UN conventions, existing practices were codified into international law, meaning that cooperation should be a smoother, and legally-backed, process regardless of the political situation. This piece argues that, although the UN International Drug Control Conventions may not have added completely novel principles or practices to transnational law enforcement, they remain an important tool in facilitating transnational police cooperation and have made a valuable contribution to jurisprudence on the subject.

Stacked Fields of Criminal Justice: The National Embeddedness of Transnational Policing

This article investigates how transnational policing is structured by the embeddedness of participating police units in national fields of criminal justice. Empirically, the analysis zooms in on the embeddedness and positionality of three different Danish police units that frequently engage in transnational cooperation. Positioned differently in the national field of criminal justice, these units have distinct capacities with regard to mobilizing and deploying material and symbolic resources and, consequently, have distinct modes of engagement with transnational policing. Conceptually expanding this insight to capture the structure of transnational policing more generally, this article develops the concept of “stacked fields” to capture how transnational cooperation and power relations are formatted by the national, institutional, and positional embeddedness of participating police units and agents.

Citizen‐Suspect: Navigating Surveillance and Policing in Urban Kenya

ABSTRACTThis article privileges the grounded geographies of the war on terror, focusing on those who grapple with its everyday policing powers. Informed by ethnographic research in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa, I explore how Kenyan Muslim activists experience and make sense of the networked assemblages of police power that transform urban spaces into “gray zones” that fall within the ambiguous spectrum between war and peace. As US‐trained Kenyan police employ military tactics of tracking and targeting potential terror suspects in quotidian urban spaces, they rely on “pop‐up” interventions such as abductions, house raids, and makeshift checkpoints—flexible maneuvers designed to match the amorphousness of the so‐called enemy. I introduce the term citizen‐suspect to shed light on actually existing citizenship in the urban gray zone. Citizen‐suspects contend not simply with the fear and paranoia that come with subjection to surveillance and suspicion but with the knowledge that is needed to navigate the shape‐shifting geographies of transnational policing.

A fighting fetish: On transnational police and their warlike presentation of self

Transnational police readily use martial language in the stories they tell about their work. Their actual work, however, tells a different and less dramatic story. Why, then, do they insist on these warlike tales? Why is there a discrepancy between the self-representation of transnational policing and its reality? Using an ethnographic study, this article provides some answers. First, it includes an overview of three established explanations of the inclination of transnational police to represent their work in warlike terms. Next, an additional reading is presented. Building on Reiner’s discussion of “police fetishism”, this reading proposes that transnational policing actors have an idée fixe about their own professional inevitability. They blindly believe that policing must exist, but also that it has to be done combatively to truly work. In conclusion, the article contemplates what the existence of such a “fighting fetish” means in both theoretical and reform terms.

Stacked Fields of Criminal Justice: The National Embeddedness of Transnational Policing

This article investigates how transnational police cooperation is structured by the embeddedness of participating police units in national fields of criminal justice. Empirically, the analysis zooms in on the positionality and embeddedness of three different Danish police units that frequently engage in transnational cooperation. Positioned differently in the national field of criminal justice, these units had different capacities with regard to mobilizing and deploying material and symbolic resources and, consequently, had distinct modes of engagement with transnational police. Conceptually expanding this insight to capture the structure of transnational police collaboration more generally, the article develops the concept of ‘stacked fields’ to capture how such cooperation is formatted by the national, institutional and positional embeddedness of participating police units and agents.

Balancing International Police Cooperation: INTERPOL and the Undesirable Trade-off Between Rights of Individuals and Global Security

With 194 members, INTERPOL is the most influential actor in matters of transnational policing. Regrettably, the organisation is vulnerable against cases of misuse. Certain states manage to exploit the tools of the organisation, to persecute and track political dissidents or non-aligned members of the media outside their borders. As such, INTERPOL has become a prime example on how non-democratic countries can exert their influence and expand their reach well beyond their domestic jurisdictions via their participation in international organisations. Not wanting to allow the proliferation of criminal havens in certain regions, the organisation has opted to connect with and bring together as many police forces of different states as possible. Evidently, such connections are created with little or no consideration of the state of criminal justice systems and forms of government of the countries involved, as well as any subsequent risks. Such a complex state of affairs demands a thorough reflection on whether it is acceptable to compromise between the need for security and the rights of individuals and procedural justice. The issue has vast legal and practical ramifications, and it is ultimately a question pertaining to the realm of global constitutionalism. Does INTERPOL have the legal authority to be in charge of finding a balance between security and procedural justice? If so, on what legal basis, and to what extent?

Meetings or Power Weeks? Boundary Work in a Transnational Police Project

Meetings are common in contemporary working life, but they are often overlooked in academic studies and sometimes defined as empty or boring by employees. Yet, the meeting society is being reproduced again and again. There seem to be hidden ways to incorporate meetings into today’s working life without arousing critique about pointless activities and deviations from what should really be done. One strategy was illustrated in a study of a transnational police project. Police culture celebrates visible crime fighting, which is associated with action, physical toughness, and capturing criminals. The police officers involved in the project emphasized the need to avoid “a lot of meetings,” but de facto constructed their project as meetings. Nonetheless, the project was declared a success. We analyze this paradox in terms of boundary work concerning meetings; the police officers turned some meetings into “real police work” by discursively and practically removing them from the category of bureaucracy and its associations with formalities, rigidity, and documentation. The most important example is how an “operational action group meeting” was renamed “power weeks,” eradicating the very word “meeting” from the term. This was closely associated with increased informality and multi-tasking during these gatherings.

A transnational police network co-operating up to the limits of the law: examination of the origin of INTERPOL

ABSTRACT INTERPOL was not created by a treaty, nor was it created by states. INTERPOL was developed by a group of diverse domestic police officers, who structured the international entity and designed its legal framework in order to co-operate within the limits set by the laws of their respective countries. As a product of the police environment, for many years INTERPOL was constituted in a way that made it look like a private police club, feeding the general confusion concerning the membership, the role, and the legal status of the organisation. Addressing many of the historical traits of INTERPOL provides a key for understanding the reasons behind the current configuration of central parts of INTERPOL's legal framework, as well as their past and present significance. For this purpose, this article explores the history of INTERPOL by presenting fragments of historical legal documents, which are then analysed and contextualised.

Transnational Policing after the 1848–1849 Revolutions: The Habsburg Empire in the Mediterranean

This article investigates the policing measures of the Habsburg Empire against the exiled defeated revolutionaries in the Mediterranean after the 1848–1849 revolutions. The examination of this counter-revolutionary policy reveals the pioneering role Austria played in international policing. It shows, in particular, that Vienna invested more heavily in policing in the Mediterranean after 1848 than it did in other regions, such as Western Europe, due to the multitude of ‘Forty-Eighters’ settled there and the alleged inadequacy of the local polities (e.g., the Ottoman Empire, Greece) to satisfactorily deal with the refugee question themselves. The article explains that Austria made use of a wide array of both official and unofficial techniques to contain these allegedly dangerous political dissidents. These methods ranged from official police collaboration with Greece and the Ottoman Empire to more subtle regional information exchanges with Naples and Russia. However, they also included purely unilateral methods exercised by the Austrian consuls, Austrian Lloyd sailors and ship captains, and ad hoc recruited secret agents to monitor the émigrés at large. Overall, the article argues that Austrian policymakers in the aftermath of 1848 invented new policing formulas and reshaped different pre-existing institutions (e.g., consuls, Austrian Lloyd), channelling them against their opponents in exile. Therefore, apart from surveying early modes of international policing, this study also adds to the discussion about Austrian (and European) state-building and, furthermore, to the more specific discussion of how European states dealt with political dissidents abroad in the nineteenth century.

Embodying the nation, representing the state: Performativity of police work in the Franco-Romanian bilateral agreement

The French police and Romanian forces seek to identify, surveil and control Romanian citizens who are suspected to be ‘irregular migrants’ or ‘criminals’ in France. The two states sealed a bilateral agreement to deploy Romanian police forces on French territory: twice a year Romanian uniformed officers patrol next to the French police, whereas liaison officers work throughout the year in several French police units. Policing its own citizens on another state territory becomes part of police work in the EU, a police model encouraged and criticized at the same time. This article engages in debates on geographies of policing and cross-national policing in the context of EU citizens’ deportation. It problematizes the ‘imagined’ and ‘fictional’ in nation, state and police work instead of the claimed management, control, and law enforcement. It scrutinizes the role of performativity in the work of Romanian and French joint police forces. It documents cultural organization of the police in France and Romania, and it empirically explores personal positions in Franco-Romanian police forces working together in the Paris region. This article aims to evidence the cultural, social and institutional dynamics within transnational policing played out against the background of a bilateral mission.