Cross-Border Policing

Definition

A term that refers to forms of social control involving the deployment of surveillance, backed up by the potential to threaten or use coercion that transgresses formally demarcated geographical boundaries. Modern policing has primarily been understood to concern the internal social order of states, but there is ample historical evidence to suggest that policing power has been deployed internationally, albeit on a relatively small scale, throughout the modern period. Theories that concern policing in its fully transnational aspect have framed it in terms of high and low policing, taking place under public, private or hybrid auspices and, further, have incorporated aspects of globalization theory, network theory, and theories about the impact of information technologies on social organization. Some authors argue that the technological underpinnings of globalization are leading in the direction of a globalizing surveillance apparatus with distinctly totalitarian tendencies, albeit under a variety of simulations whereby the liberal democratic legacy can be made to substitute for liberal democratic practices. Other scholars focus on border enforcement and migration control in the reproduction of nation state sovereignty.

Distinctive Features

Controlling populations and territory is an essential aspect of policing. Early ethnographies of beat policing revealed the importance of craft knowledge concerning the significance of formal boundaries for police patrol units. For example, the displacement of trouble from one beat to the next was an often observed feature of territorially based [Page 71]policing, whether or not such displacement took effect as the result of formal or informal (subcultural) policy choices. Boundaries are both a tactical and strategic resource for policing. By the 1990s advances in communications and transportation technologies led some theorists of globalization to suggest that the modern state (which had been built with the more limited technologies of an earlier age) might be practically transcended as governance became transnational and, eventually, global in scope. Since the police were understood to be the keystone of modern executive government it was hypothesized that, like the proverbial canary in the mine, transformations in policing would be indicative of the character of this newly emerging social and political form.

Historical studies of international policing reveal that, in order to better guarantee the internal order of nationally bounded societies, it has sometimes been thought necessary for policing agents to undertake international police missions. For example, in the nineteenth century, a variety of European policing agencies undertook cross-border surveillance because of concerns about anarchist agitators and other political radicals. A notable example of this was the occasional surveillance by Prussian police of Karl Marx during the years he remained resident in London. The interests of public police agencies in cross-border cooperation in the control of political radicalism and ordinary law crime, initially primarily in Europe, eventually led to the establishment of Interpol in the period just prior to the Second World War, not by treaty or other similar international legal instrument, but rather by the multi-lateral efforts of police administrators themselves. This demonstrates the relative autonomy of police agents vis-à-vis the state, especially in the space between sovereignties that exists in the cross-border situation. There are also many interesting examples of cross-border policing under private auspices and by municipal police forces that date back to the nineteenth century, which again suggests that policing power is only loosely coupled to national-state sovereignty. While it has been established that modern policing has transgressed national boundaries from time to time almost from its inception, it is also generally agreed that in the post-Cold War era this type of practice became more significant and frequent.

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