International Prosecution and National Bureaucracy: The Contest to Define International Practices Within the Danish Prosecution Service

Abstract

This article explores how international ideals and practices of law enforcement come into conflict with national bureaucracies. Drawing on original interviews, the investigation demonstrates how the competition to define the role of international prosecution impacted career strategies as well as the actual administration of criminal law within the Danish Prosecution Service (DPS). The analysis shows that this competition is embodied in two competing groups of prosecutors situated in a wider national bureaucracy—itself subject to transformations that affect the very stakes of the contest to define the international. While the institutionalists build careers closely attuned to the systemic and increasingly lean-management-inspired requirements of the DPS, the dissident and consequently unsettled position of the activists leads them to craft alternative career strategies closely related to the emergence of new international fields of criminal law.

Who Rules the World?

“…In fact, the data and analysis presented suggest that international judges tend to be educationally embedded in national legal fields. This finding seems to confirm earlier studies of global legal elites that have similarly emphasized how international lawyers make large parts of their careers in domestic fields (Bourdieu 1996a;Jarle Christensen 2016). What is highlighted by such studies, as well as the present one, is that the international sphere of law to a large extent is a continuation of domestic forms of reproducing elites (Dezalay and Madsen 2012).…”

Why lawyers internationalize and police transnationalize: disjointed criminal justice at the border of the state

“…To make intelligible the different forms of expertise accumulated by these elites, three species of career capital were identified and used to code the biographical material. These species were practical, academic, and political expertise, dimensions identified through previous fieldwork in the two fields [43,44] and corroborated by the data built for the article. In order to identify the relative distribution of career experience across the three species, each of the collected career biographies were coded for whether or not the individual had been employed within practice, academia, and/or politics.…”

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

“…However, the unit soon proved to target mostly small-scale sellers and seller/users (Brydensholt, 1971). Despite this apparent paradox, the pervasiveness of drug crime and abuse throughout Denmark has given specialized drug squads a central role in the system where their work is attributed with significant professional value (Christensen, 2018).…”