Defining Success in International Border Police Collaboration

The risks and insecurities highlighted in contemporary societies have given rise to a diversity of forms of policing; intelligence based policing, and networked based collaboration projects. This study focuses on the collaboration project Turnstone, which was partly funded by the EU. The project was a joint collaboration among border organizations in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden, aiming at preventing trans-boundary criminality. Transnational border policing has a specific focus on irregular migration and cross border crime, and has produced new ways of doing police work, among these new administrative tasks. This qualitative study is based on empirical material gathered from field observations and interview sessions with officers working in the collaborating organizations. The preliminary findings suggest two conflicting demands regarding the project objectives and the understanding of success; officers faced the dilemma of being productive and achieving operative results, at the same time as they had to put time and effort into building work relationships and establish interpersonal connections. According to interviewed officers, the later was not easy to account for in official reports but was the foundation for a functioning collaboration.