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

Abstract

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.

The Declining Significance of Interpol: Policing International Terrorism After 9/11

“…As seen from the findings in most recent scholarship (Ahmad & Monaghan, 2022; Alexander, 2019; Chalk, 2022; Kirisci, 2022; Monaghan, 2022; San, 2020), police agencies across many parts of the world have also retained this counterterrorism focus, even when problems of terrorism have not materialized to the extent once feared in the uncertain post-9/11 era. Continuing a long-standing process (Deflem, 2002), internationally oriented activities are thereby preferred to be undertaken unilaterally (without cooperation, typically by stationing agents abroad) or otherwise involve relatively small and temporary cooperation efforts enacted through liaison officers, both within and across countries (e.g., Christensen, 2021; Ghani, 2018; Heyer, 2022; Sausdal, 2021). Thus, by example, within nations, counterterrorism policing is conducted through multi-agency partnerships that act as force-multipliers.…”

“…Despite the widely acknowledged global nature of the terrorism problem, the role of Interpol in matters of counterterrorism presently pales in comparison to the counterterrorism strategies devised by individual police agencies within nations. A qualitative shift in international policing methods is also revealed, as police prefer to engage in unilateral measures against international terrorism or engage in cooperation efforts on a more limited scale, typically in an ad hoc fashion in view of specific incidents, as well as in other multilateral initiatives, such as Europol (see, e.g., Christensen, 2021; Heyer, 2022; Jansson, 2018; San, 2020).…”