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.

KEYWORDS:

• International interventions
• peace- and statebuilding
• police missions
• transnational policing
• European Union
• common foreign and security policy

Introduction

Police have been operating across national borders for centuries. Over the past few decades especially, police deployments abroad have grown significantly, and police tasks have broadened considerably.¹ This trend is particularly visible in crisis management, peacebuilding and stabilization operations, where police participation increased exponentially during the 1990s and 2000s.² Today, police deployed abroad fulfil tasks that range from executive roles like the direct provision of security, to police training and institutional reform as well as providing material support to host-state police services. Based on the shared assumption that sustainable peace in post-conflict environments requires effective and accountable domestic policing, a variety of multilateral organizations today deploy police missions abroad.³ UN Security Council resolution 2185 (2014) emphasizes that policing has become an essential part of multilateral peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding. While the vast majority of police officers are deployed through the UN’s Department of Peace Operations (DPO), officers are also deployed through regional organizations, including the African Union (AU), the European Union’s (EU) Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and a host of bilateral programmes.

In contrast to the larger debate on military support to and principles of the use of force in multilateral peacekeeping,⁴ comparatively little is known about police deployments as part of multilateral missions. Available research is mainly clustered around individual country contributions to these missions.⁵ And while recent research has analysed aspects of the evolution of European and UN police missions over time,⁶ available research does not have much to offer when it comes to questions of how multilateral police missions function internally or how police work develops on the ground.

This article opens up this black box of multilateral police missions, studying how individual officers deployed through civilian CSDP missions of the EU interpret and implement their mandates and thereby contribute to the continuous evolution of multilateral missions and peace support operations. Our focus is on how missions operate at the level of day-to-day business. We also investigate the factors shaping the way mission members go about implementing ambitious mandates in volatile conditions that fundamentally differ from conditions back home. Shedding light on the everyday work within missions adds substance to the ‘emergent field of global policing’.⁷

The article shows that police work in multilateral missions is shaped more by conditions on the ground and in-mission than is suggested by predominant debates about the emergence of transnational policing⁸ or a professional peacekeeping field.⁹ While this literature focuses on how police and peacebuilding staff deployed abroad transcend their national backgrounds and develop transnational practices, our data reveals how shared practices in multilateral police missions emerge much more locally in context- and mission-specific trajectories. We also show that everyday police work in multilateral missions is clearly more complex than a simple ‘this is how we do it back home’, and that the police officers we interviewed did not normally adhere to – or even know about – recently published international guidance documents on European or UN policing. Instead, our research shows that mission members combined three types of experience to carry out their work abroad: their own domestic policing experience, their experience in previous multilateral missions and the experience of mission colleagues. Police work in missions is therefore highly contingent on the personnel composition of a mission. At the same time, police work is ‘by its very nature […] discretionary in the sense that it involves the exercise of choice or judgment’.¹⁰ We found that this discretion is both shaped and constrained by contextual factors on-site.

As research has shown, in the past vague mission mandates often needed to be interpreted and translated into operational action, yet there was often no clear or uniform guidance on how this was to be accomplished.¹¹ At the same time, not all choices are always available. Missions are and operate in complex environments constituted by numerous stakeholders, setting the frame in which mission members must work. Our research suggests that two contextual factors in particular influence the degree of discretion and consequently also affect officers’ ability to draw on the experience available to them. First, there is the host state – its government’s preferences, policies and its history. Host states are themselves often deeply constrained in their choices by donor interests. However, host state conditions nevertheless set the frame in which missions and, in particular, its members must operate.¹² For instance, this occurs in cases where, as we outline in this article, a host state decides in favour of a particular policing approach. Secondly, within missions, there are processes of lock-in at play. These are organizational developments where dominant patterns of “how things are done” become fixed and sometimes develop a quasi-deterministic character.¹³ We suggest that such lock-in effects may, over time, spur the emergence of transnationalized policing practices. However, we also find that transnational policing practices do not follow, nor do they constitute, models of policing or policing scripts that are shared across the globe or even across the EU. Instead, over time, the choices of successive police officers – often deployed in frequent rotation – sediment into institutional legacies that then constrain the actions of subsequent police officers deployed to the same mission. Missions, the longer they are in place, thus settle into specific policing approaches. The transnational harmonization that we do observe remains within the contexts in which it emerges; transnationalized policing practices are mission-specific and continue to evolve within the mission.

To support this argument, we draw on a wide range of qualitative data to flesh out in which ways and under what conditions police officers (can) make use of their experience. We thus open up the ‘black box’ of multilateral policing,¹⁴ zooming in on how police officers navigate the complex environments posed by multilateral missions. The article unpacks how individual police officers in three research sites (EULEX Kosovo, EUAM Ukraine and EUCAP Sahel Niger) interpret and do their jobs, and which conditions shape their activities. All three missions under investigation are relatively small when compared to those of the UN. Except for EULEX Kosovo’s executive component, their activities are limited to providing training and advice to local counterparts.

In addition to a review of secondary literature in the field, our research draws on an overall set of 90 semi-structured, problem-centred interviews with European police officers conducted between August 2019 and July 2021.¹⁵ The interviews followed a set of guiding questions, generally ranged from 45 to 90 minutes in length and were – bar a few exceptions – recorded. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions, roughly two thirds of the interviews were conducted via a variety of video-conferencing systems or via telephone.¹⁶ Initial contacts were established through senior mission leadership or the relevant departments managing international deployments for the respective national police services. Subsequently, further contacts emerged by way of referral. Our research was informed by an abductive logic of enquiry, meaning that research was conducted as a reiterative and recursive process, moving between theory, methodology and empirical material.¹⁷

Previous accounts of police officers’ work in international missions are mostly limited to the perspective of officers from one country who deploy to missions abroad,¹⁸ or even to the perspective of officers from one country who deploy to one particular mission.¹⁹ In comparison, our data offers a broader range of perspectives in terms of officers’ nationality and mission participation. In addition to officers from Germany and Sweden, who figure prominently in our data, we draw on interviews with smaller numbers of officers from the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal, France, Norway, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Austria and Ireland. At 23.6 percent, the gender split in our sample corresponds to the overall ratio of women (police and non-police) seconded to civilian CSDP Missions (22 percent as of June 2019).²⁰ Yet our dataset is, of course, neither exhaustive nor strictly representative. Some European police services were more inclined to support our research than others, meaning that officers from certain countries are either underrepresented or not represented at all. More importantly, even though almost a third (28) of our interviewees also drew on their experiences as members of UN missions, our findings predominantly relate to deployments with the EU. Hence, even though our research provides extensive insight into the field of multilateral police work and the inner workings of multilateral missions, it would require further empirical investigation to confidently extend our argument to the world of UN policing.

The paper is structured as follows. We first present two dominant perspectives on police work in international deployments. The first highlights the emergence of harmonized policing approaches due to increased international and transnational police cooperation, the emergence of a field of ‘peacebuilding professionals’, and international efforts to define and harmonize policing approaches. A second perspective stresses the staying power of domestic policing models in international deployments. We argue that while both perspectives have merit, closer attention needs to be paid to the highly localized, mission-specific and sometimes conflicting ways in which policing practices in multilateral missions emerge.

To make this argument, the paper’s second section presents evidence from three research sites to reveal how police practices emerge in multilateral deployments. In a third section, we discuss two contextual factors to account for how police practices in missions develop over time: the role of host states’ choices and local lock-in effects that affect the extent of police discretion available in missions. The conclusion summarizes the findings and discusses implications for research and policy.

Understanding Police Work in Multilateral Missions

Available research offers inroads into understanding how police work is carried out in multilateral missions. Two perspectives can be distinguished. The first highlights shared understandings of policing and the potential of international or transnational harmonization. The second expects police work in multilateral missions to be shaped by a continuation of distinctly national policing scripts reflecting unique historical trajectories.

Shared Global and Transnational Policing Scripts

The view that police officers across the globe have much in common with one another is popular in the literature on domestic and international policing. As the adage goes: ‘A cop is a cop’. Police scholars have pointed to common personality traits such as action-orientation, cynicism, suspicion, solidarity and conservatism.²¹ In particular, James Sheptycki and his collaborators have also argued that this policing subculture transcends national boundaries.²²

Moreover, there has been an increase in the interaction among police officers from different countries through, for example, the exchange of personnel, liaison networks, foreign training and technical aid programmes, mutual legal assistance agreements, joint operations, and intelligence sharing.²³ Increased transnational interaction is said to have spurred a convergence in police thinking and in terms of how police operate. As Robert Reiner puts it, networks of ‘technocratic police experts […] are responsible for the diffusion of fashions in police thinking around the globe’.²⁴ Other scholars point to ‘traveling models’ such as community policing or intelligence-led policing,²⁵ which are reproduced by a transnational ‘police policy community’.²⁶ For Greener, these developments ‘contribute […] to a broader agenda of standardization, the pursuit of common policing principles and norms at a global level’.²⁷

Some authors, in a similar vein as the argument about the emergence of transnational policing, have pointed to the rise of a professional peacekeeping field that transcends the national background of peacekeepers in missions. Research on peacebuilding has, for instance, revealed the emergence of professional bubbles in which transnational understandings and common practices of intervention emerge.²⁸

Most peacekeeping and, by extension, most international police deployments take place within and through international organizations, some of which have taken an active role in developing international guidance documents on police missions in recent years. At the regional level, the European Union represents the world’s densest police cooperation network.²⁹ At the global level, the United Nations has developed and disseminated specific guidance on policing. Several UN instruments regulate the use of police force.³⁰ In recent years, and following a push for more harmonization of policing in its missions, the UN initiated a Strategic Guidance Framework for International Policing (SGF). As a result, the UN published a policy on police in peacekeeping operations in 2014 which ‘spells out the core functions of United Nations police peacekeeping and the fundamental principles guiding its activities’.³¹ Building on the SGF, the UN also developed a number guidance documents and manuals on specific police tasks or approaches.³² For example, in 2018, the UN published a manual on Community-Oriented Policing in United Nations Peace Operations.³³ In the past, other international organizations have also produced manuals or guiding documents to promote principles and best practices of international policing.³⁴

Both, transnationally shared policing approaches and the new guidance material developed by international organizations, are expected to play a significant role in shaping how police officers carry out their day-to-day work within international missions.

Variation in Domestic Policing Scripts

In contrast to these accounts and expectations of emerging forms of global or transnational policing, other research points to persistent variation in domestic policing. From this perspective, policing scripts are not so much global or shared transnationally; rather, they are marked by differences among police agencies from different countries (as well as among police agencies from the same country and among different units within the same police agency). Even scholars who emphasize similarities in police culture across borders acknowledge such variation. Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner and James Sheptycki argue that police culture

is not monolithic, and is embodied in individuals who enjoy autonomy and creativity. There are particular variants – ‘subcultures’ – that can be discerned within police occupational culture, generated by distinct experiences associated with specific structural positions (ranks, specialisms, areas, etc.), or by special orientations officers bring with them from their past biographies and histories. In addition, cultures vary between forces, shaped by the differing patterns and problems of their environments, and the legacies of their histories.³⁵

The importance of specific police cultures is underlined by studies examining the difficulty of reforming the police. Various cases illustrate how police cultures have stymied reform efforts despite strong political will and public pressure for reform.³⁶ Moreover, researchers have revealed historically and geographically contingent political, social and economic conditions that undergird specific police models, creating significant cross-national and even intra-national variation with regard to the number of police, the degree of centralization and militarization, divisions of labour between the police and criminal justice agencies, the sources of police legitimacy, police oversight mechanisms, views on the use of force, and how police are being trained.³⁷ As Mawby outlines, the police models of different countries have historically varied markedly, and models change in response to local rather than global dynamics.³⁸ Bayley shows that states which experience violent resistance during the state-building phase are more likely to have centralized and militarized police forces.³⁹ Wilson points to the importance of local political structures as shaping policing structures and practices.⁴⁰

This perspective suggests that the main drivers of how members of multilateral missions carry out their work are to be found at the level of the sending states. Although empirical research on multilateral police missions is still scarce, initial findings suggest that even when police operate under the same international mandates and face the same problems, officers tend to follow their national policing scripts. There is tentative evidence for this in studies on UN peace operations⁴¹ and on police components complementing military peace support operations in the Balkans.⁴² Focusing on UN policing, Hills finds ‘no evidence of a common policecraft, or of a set of norms capable of fulfilling this requirement’.⁴³ And as Friesendorf demonstrates in regard to Germany and Italy, even police forces from countries with similar political systems, such as liberal democracies, often follow dissimilar policing strategies and practices abroad.⁴⁴ If the perspective previously discussed suggests similarity or convergence in policing approaches in multilateral missions, this viewpoint suggests variation – missions are likely to be sites where divergent national policing scripts coexist or even clash.

In the next section, we present our empirical findings to show that, on the one hand, significant variation in police practices persists even within multilateral missions – pointing to the continued significance of domestic policing scripts in shaping police officers’ work abroad. On the other hand, our interviews show that while officers often draw on experience gained during years of service back home, it does not mean that police work in multilateral missions strictly follows national practices. When officers from different countries (have to) cooperate, we find that the outcome is a mix of practices from different national police contexts combined with the influence of context-specific and host state-specific factors.

Everyday Police Work Abroad: Evidence from Three Research Sites

In Search of Guidance for Everyday Police Work Abroad

Despite academic discussions about the transnationalization of police work⁴⁵ and recent efforts to harmonize policing approaches on an international level,⁴⁶ our data shows that police work in EU missions has so far not been characterized by a reliance on internationally shared guidance on specific police tasks. Instead, we found that members of three missions (EULEX Kosovo, EUAM Ukraine and EUCAP Sahel Niger) primarily drew on individual experience – their own domestic policing experience, experience from previous missions and the experience of mission colleagues – in implementing their mandates.

International guidance documents such as the UN’s Strategic Guidance Framework or manuals focusing on specific policy areas appear to have had little to no impact on the day-to-day work or specific policing practices in EU missions. These documents are either not known – apart from mission mandates, most interviewees were unable to point to any guidance documents from international organizations – or they are seen as too unspecific. This last point is best captured by the remarks of a Swedish police officer working for EUAM Ukraine:

Well, I think the documents I have seen so far, I would say they are a good standard, because they are supporting you. You can use it. “Oh, wow, I forgot to think about that.” But they are not the roadmap for my work here. It is more supportive.⁴⁷

Only two officers, a German and a Norwegian who both train others to work abroad, referred to the UN Strategic Guidance Framework.⁴⁸ Both were familiar with the SGF because they had been personally involved in developing guidance material. However, as the Norwegian officer explained, for regular officers who go on a mission:

[W]e see that if we have a […] person from Bangladesh working on COP, then a Norwegian, then a German, then one from South America, then two from Malawi – yes, they know about community-oriented policing, but they know about the home content. They have never read the SGF material and the policy on community-oriented policing.⁴⁹

Despite the current lack of recourse to internationally shared operational guidance on the ground, our interlocutors often saw themselves as being “more or less on the same page”, especially in reference to policing in and across Europe. This view is particularly prominent when officers who served in both EU and UN missions compare their work in these missions. Officers discussed EU missions as being more homogeneous in terms of views on policing and levels of professionalism, as well as general culture.⁵⁰ Yet when European officers in EU missions refer to shared scripts, they remain vague: ‘Because today, in all European countries, the basic principles and values are the same’.⁵¹ Especially the importance of human rights and adherence to the “rule of law” were referred to as standards that were shared across Europe and therefore guide the work of European police officers:

Well, built into that model, there is a lot of international standards: human rights, as the most indicated one. The narrative is based on human rights and what that means actually. Yeah, basically it is human rights, what you can call international standards.⁵²

I think there are common understandings and there especially are common standards, when it comes to the rule of law, when it comes to human rights. Here, because of EU regulations, we are not so far apart and in certain areas the regulations have led to a certain harmonization.⁵³

These perceived “standards” relate to Bayley’s notion of “democratic policing” as a shared bottom-line for European police officers.⁵⁴ However, is a cop from Europe thus a European cop? When pressed to speak about the specificities of policing approaches, interviewees referred to enduring differences among police services in Europe as well – in particular on the level of tactics and with regard to leadership styles – and indicated that these differences become apparent when working within a multilateral mission.⁵⁵ Our evidence from CSDP missions therefore suggests that when European police officers deploy abroad, they do not draw on globally shared scripts of how policing ought to look. One interlocutor even noted a lack of standardization as an obstacle to her work within the mission: ‘The shortcoming is that there were no standards, guidelines coming from the EU’.⁵⁶

To be sure, as we discussed previously, the extent to which police officers have a shared understanding of police tactics, for example, varies across areas of policing as well as types of police agencies. Our interviews indicate a stronger potential for shared transnational policing scripts from officers coming from Gendarmerie-type forces, which often have a military status and are more internationally oriented than civilian police services. The European Gendarmerie Force (EGF)⁵⁷ appeared in some of our interviews as an important forum for cooperation, exchange and doctrine creation among gendarmeries.⁵⁸ But even here, our interviews point to important cross-national differences.⁵⁹

International guidance and European policing standards thus play rather limited roles in the day-to-day work of police officers deployed abroad. What is more, some mission members reported higher levels of discretion in their work abroad than at home. Lower-ranked officers in particular stressed that the framework offered by multilateral missions often means more responsibility and increased discretion in how they handle the tasks assigned to them.⁶⁰

Navigating Police Work Abroad: Experience Matters

How do mission members then implement their mandates? We found officers’ previous domestic professional experience with a specific subject to be highly relevant for how they tackled their everyday work in international missions. Even though officers regularly stressed that domestic approaches cannot simply be transferred to mission areas,⁶¹ most of our interviewees pointed to their own professional experience as a vital resource in facilitating their mission work. One female Swedish police officer noted that she had ‘been an officer for more than 30 years’ to emphasize her experience in community policing.⁶² Similar references came up repeatedly in our interviews:

I am here actually as a road traffic safety expert. Because I have worked in the Swedish police for 37 years. And for 20 out of these 37, I have worked on traffic in Sweden. And I have been to other CSDP missions, also working with traffic. So that is mainly what I should do.⁶³

Another Swedish officer with EUAM Ukraine referred to this professional background with the Swedish police as his “backpack” of tools that he brings to the mission.⁶⁴

Our interviews also tentatively suggest a shift in the ways that domestic professional experience is put to use in police missions. In the past, officers’ professional backgrounds did not necessarily correspond to the jobs they were assigned abroad. In recent years, as CSDP missions have become smaller and more specialized, missions have begun to place a greater emphasis on applicants’ professional backgrounds, and they have introduced more specific requirements in their hiring processes. Today, for instance, officers working in close protection for EULEX Kosovo are expected to have a background in this particular field of police work. In the past, this was not necessarily the case.⁶⁵ Knowing prior to deployment what the mission jobs actually entail was also discussed as an aspect that made EU missions comparatively more attractive than those of the UN. With the UN, officers generally apply for the mission as such rather than for a specific position in it.⁶⁶ They therefore might find themselves working in positions that have little to no relation to their expertise as a police officer.⁶⁷ Yet even though there has been a shift in the EU missions, we still occasionally see officers working in subject areas they originally knew little about.⁶⁸ Hence, the extent to which officers (can) draw on their domestic policing experience depends – perhaps unsurprisingly – on them actually working in a subject area that they are at least familiar with.

Experience is not limited to police work back home, though; many officers also draw on experience from previous multilateral missions. While a police officer’s deployment abroad is usually only an interlude, temporarily taking them out of their regular domestic police service, “going abroad” is often more than a one-off. Most officers interviewed for our project had previous international experience. One female German officer even reported having gone on eleven tours of various forms and lengths.⁶⁹ This previous experience – sometimes even previous experience in the same mission⁷⁰ – figured prominently in discussions about how officers knew how to navigate complex mission environments. One Dutch officer went as far as to suggest that ‘all in all, mission work is mission work, wherever you are’.⁷¹ The relevance of this previous experience is further exemplified by the fact that virtually all officers with prior international experience discussed previous deployments when asked how they prepared themselves for their most recent mission.

A combination of domestic professional experience and experience in international settings is also highly valued in other mission members. Mission members regard their colleagues as important sources of guidance or information. This is especially the case for mission members with little previous international experience or little experience in a particular area of policing: ‘You learned from your own practice, form colleagues. Because we have a lot of colleagues here from Sweden and Denmark, who are really, really experienced in this community policing stuff and other problems’.⁷² Thus, experienced officers become authoritative peers within the mission. This authority of (professional) experience was a particularly prominent theme in our conversations with officers working in operative capacities requiring a high degree of cooperation and coordination, such as in close protection or as part of the Special Intervention Unit within EULEX Kosovo.⁷³ In EUAM Ukraine, a Polish police officer, previously unfamiliar with the project management techniques used in the mission, drew on existing material he found in the mission as well as the knowledge of colleagues familiar with the technique: ‘With the first project, it is learning by doing’.⁷⁴ And in EUCAP Sahel Niger, a Portuguese officer went beyond the mission and relied on input from his local counterparts to carry out an assignment for which he lacked the necessary expertise:

I don’t have any background in terms of the practical work in a court in terms of the secretariat, you know? So we called them, those guys who are in charge of these jobs. We presented them our goal, our objective and we worked together to prepare the contents. Now we are preparing the content of the next training for these people. It is a cooperation between us and them. Of course, you need to have some background in terms of justice functions. Otherwise, you are completely blind. But I am not an expert.⁷⁵

Similarly, for newcomers with no prior experience in multilateral missions, more experienced colleagues may become a central point of reference. A female German officer, deployed to EUCAP Sahel Niger as her first mission, relied extensively on her more experienced French colleague in the mission: ‘[he] was really experienced when it comes to international missions, he was in Kosovo a few times, then he was in Mali, I think in the EU mission in Mali, EUCAP Sahel Mali’.⁷⁶ In this regard, our research also confirms Distler’s earlier account, in which he highlights how exchanges with current mission members played a crucial role in knowledge formation for newcomers among German members of EULEX Kosovo.⁷⁷ The same goes for predecessors whose professional experience, enshrined in policy documents or training material, becomes an important resource for current mission members even though officers who precede or succeed each other do not actually work together directly.

Putting Experience to Work in Missions

The way police officers develop police training courses and materials for their local police counterparts highlights the importance of the three identified forms of experience for navigating the often highly uncertain and volatile environments posed by multilateral missions. In cases where new police training materials had to be created, officers reported a particularly high level of discretion, leaving them with a free hand to create new content as they saw fit: ‘it stands or falls with your own creativity, your own preferences and also your pedagogical competency’;⁷⁸ ‘We were free in designing the content’;⁷⁹ ‘So there are some points which need to be in the training session. But apart from that you can do whatever you want, I think’;⁸⁰ ‘I personally did this one, nobody has asked me anything. And I uploaded it now’.⁸¹ The high degree of discretion present in these testimonies appears to be an intentional feature of how work is organized within missions. This is because, as a Romanian police officer working on training policies in EUCAP Sahel Niger pointed out in reference to the mission’s thematic experts: ‘they are in charge to come up with the plan, the objectives, with what skills we are interested in, the profile of the [training] candidates’.⁸²

Our interviews reveal that when an individual police officer is tasked with creating a training module, they will generally rely on their domestic policing experience: ‘I mean I have been in the Swedish police service for 37 years and I can only give Swedish advice. How can I give something else, right?’⁸³ This is significant because, as the same officer with EUAM Ukraine points out: ‘In some missions, it comes very much down to individuals. And even in this mission, a lot of training has been developed by one person, singularly’.⁸⁴ Here, we can discern how an officer’s recourse to his domestic policing experience influences how missions conduct their business. This partly confirms accounts that stress the prevalence of domestic policing scripts in multilateral missions. Within the missions, this influence seems to be readily acknowledged: ‘Of course, when a German, a Swede, a Dane, or a Pole begins a project with their individual background, this individual background will always have an impact’.⁸⁵

However, that does not necessarily mean policing in multilateral missions will mirror national policing scripts. Especially when several officers from different countries are involved, our research suggests that the training material developed is more likely to reflect a combination of different policing scripts. This is exemplified by two German police officers’ accounts of how they developed new training curricula in EUCAP Sahel Niger and EULEX Kosovo:

To be honest, for this course [on observation], we did it from nothing. There was a [female] French colleague and a Romanian, and the three of us sat down together and thought about what we can offer our local counterparts. […] We started with what are the circumstances here, what are the special conditions, how do people move? That is fundamentally different from Paris, Berlin or Bucharest. We threw our experiences together and put together the experience we have due to our training.⁸⁶

There were no SOPs because until then this was not really among the primary tasks, it was only done occasionally. And then we said, ok, let’s introduce some structure. And then I sat down together with two other colleagues, a German and a Croat. We discussed it, worked through it and then also trained it with our people.⁸⁷

The first quote above hints at contextual factors (“special conditions” in the host state) that affect the extent to which police officers can freely rely on experience as guidance for their work abroad. The next section discusses how such contextual factors affect police officers’ work in the mission by curtailing the level of discretion available to mission members.

Constraining Police Work Abroad

Host State Preferences, Policies and Histories

The power of multilateral police missions to set agendas and determine priorities varies in relation to the power of host states. The extremes are international “protectorates” run by international actors, as in post-war Kosovo and East Timor.⁸⁸ But even when international actors have significant clout, host states are likely to have a voice, too. As Marenin writes: ‘Domestic political contexts in recipient countries affect perceptions and demands for policing and what is desirable or allowed, for changes in policing restructure (or have the potential to) power relations’.⁸⁹

The EUAM Ukraine and EUCAP Sahel Niger (and Mali) missions illustrate that the preferences, policies and histories of host states significantly shape police officers’ day-to-day work in missions. In Ukraine, the government decided to adopt a “Scandinavian Model” for public order policing. This decision restricts the extent to which members of EUAM can rely on their domestic experience in supporting changes to how the Ukrainian police deals with crowds. For example, officers working in EUAM expected the mission’s newly appointed head of the Public Order Unit to have knowledge of the “Scandinavian Model” or to at least adhere to it:

I hope that he is an expert on this approach. Otherwise, why are we introducing a concept, which the head of unit is not familiar with? […] He is supposed to be an expert on the issue.⁹⁰

As a Danish member of the unit also explained in reference to a Croatian colleague, police officers joining the unit might first have to familiarize themselves with the “Scandinavian Model” and thus adhere to a policing model originating in another country:

He has been working with public order and he came just a few weeks after me. He has been working with public order for 20 years. But they [Czech and Croatian colleagues] don’t have the concept as we have it. And now they have agreed on this Scandinavian approach in the mission. So they need to read up about it.⁹¹

Historical legacies, too, limit mission members’ ability to rely on their experience to carry out their work. For EUCAP Sahel Niger (and also EUCAP Sahel Mali), our interviews highlight how Niger’s history as a former French colony affects European police officers’ work in the mission today. The organization of the domestic security sector in Niger still resembles the French system:

At the beginning, I was forced to plunge into the criminal procedures of Niger. It is quite the same as the French legislation. Quite the same. Because it is a colony, you know. They still have laws from the 60s, you know. It is amazing.⁹²

Police officers deployed to EUCAP Niger appeared to accept this historical legacy as an inevitable feature of the local security sector and therefore as an influence on their work.⁹³ One senior officer referred to French officers as having a comparative advantage, since the system of policing in Niger resembles the one they know from back home.⁹⁴

First Occupants and Institutional Lock-in

In addition to the role of host states, missions themselves create conditions that limit the discretion available to mission members. For one thing, incoming mission members often orient themselves by working within the bounds of what their predecessors left behind. Furthermore, operational necessity and mechanisms put in place by the missions actually prevent officers from straying too far from the paths laid down by those who came before them.

Incoming mission members often continue the work of predecessors who have left the mission. Outgoing mission members thus shape their successors’ work. This impact is especially evident when police officers are the first to occupy a specific post or to work on a specific topic: ‘So the people who come after me now, who are going to give training, they are going to use my, the Swedish way. I am not saying it is right or wrong, but they are going to use it’.⁹⁵ This may lead to situations where the first officers to occupy a post severely restrict their successors’ ability to rely on their own (domestic) policing experience: ‘Yeah, for me, it was already decided, more or less, when I came, because the training has been ongoing for one year before I came. […] So the material, someone else invented that, the curricula, the lesson plans’.⁹⁶ This may even mean that officers adhere to specific approaches they disagree with:

Sometimes I can see things in a presentation that I really don’t stand behind and think, “this is not what I think is good […]”. But I have to keep quiet because this is a compromise. I cannot say that we have to change that, unless I can justify it in such a way that I can convince you.⁹⁷

Interestingly, in our interviews, officers regularly reported having no knowledge about the origin of the training material content they inherited from their predecessors: ‘I actually don’t know who made it and how it was made’ was a common response to questions about how training material was originally developed.⁹⁸ Officers nevertheless appeared to accept it as basis for their own work.

The level of discretion available to incoming officers appears to be particularly low when adherence to one specific approach is considered an operational necessity. In the case of close protection – the physical protection of high-value or at-risk persons – officers working in EULEX Kosovo stressed that this type of police work requires coordination and cooperation on a tactical level, making it necessary for all officers involved to follow the same procedures: ‘It has to work. You cannot really do this with “learning-by-doing”. You have to have a training’.⁹⁹ To compensate for the fact that officers came with a variety of national and professional backgrounds, a mission-specific standard on close protection procedures was introduced:

There is a common standard training. And if everybody adheres to that, there usually are not that many problems. […] It is from EULEX, who have decided that this is the method we are going to use. You know, every country has their own method of doing things. And the EU has decided that we are going to use this method.¹⁰⁰

For most missions, a short, rather general induction session appears to be a common feature of training delivered to new mission members. For close protection in EULEX Kosovo (as well as the Special Intervention Unit), interviewees reported having gone through several weeks of theoretical as well as practical training which was meant to introduce them to close protection work in EULEX Kosovo.¹⁰¹ One officer, having undergone this training during his first deployment in 2011–2012, even reported having received a qualification certificate from the European Union.¹⁰² In this case, in-mission training is a mechanism that severely restricts the extent to which individual officers can resort to their own policing experience:

I might not think that is the best way but that is the way they have decided. So then I have to work according to that principle. And basically do what they decide what I am going to do. And as long as I can accept that, it is no problem. But if it would be … if someone would feel that he cannot accept that way of working because he thinks it is wrong, really wrong. Well then I would say the person would have to go home.¹⁰³

We find that, similarly to the creation of induction training in EULEX Kosovo, other missions also establish mechanisms which, over time, restrict officers’ ability to rely solely on individual or pooled experience in fulfilling their tasks. Training or coordination cells limit police discretion and flexibility by introducing and maintaining mission-wide standards. EUAM Ukraine’s “Training Cell” or EUCAP Sahel Niger’s “Unit 2” are meant to ensure that, once a training curriculum is developed, all training provided by different members of the mission adheres to this curriculum and covers the same content. Thus, training material or models that may have originally been developed by first occupants – largely relying on their personal or pooled experience – are subsequently introduced as a mission-wide standard, locking in subsequent mission members: ‘It is not like we have a new trainer coming in from Sweden who then just does any kind of training. The training will already exist on paper, so to speak. Or it will at least be coordinated by this unit’.¹⁰⁴ In EUAM Ukraine, at least, this standardization effort appears to be a more recent endeavour:

We are also helping by delivering and preparing these syllabuses – and if Kyiv approves it – because they want to have it centralized, like in all Ukraine, when it comes to our mission, it should be the same training delivered to the stations. In the past the regional offices were doing it by themselves, but now they want to have this one good training everywhere.¹⁰⁵

In the case of EUCAP Sahel Niger, as well as its sister mission in Mali, training curricula (“Mallette Pédagogique”) are also meant to provide a unified training framework for dissemination within the local police forces:

By now it has become a whole binder. Practically speaking it is meant to enable future trainers to give the lessons. This is meant to be given to someone, who then reads it two or three times and who is then able provide these lessons in Niamey or in Zinder or wherever.¹⁰⁶

To be sure, in-mission lock-in effects do not eliminate all agency and creativity; police practices in missions are constantly changing as officers rotate in and out. Even in instances where first occupants rely on their own national policing background and lock-in mechanisms subsequently restrict successors in their room for manoeuvre, policing in multilateral missions continues to evolve. In our interviews, police officers regularly stressed how they “updated” existing training material where they found it to be necessary: ‘Some of this already existed in the training session. But we reviewed a lot of things because the training session was made maybe five years ago. And a lot of things evolved since then’.¹⁰⁷ An officer working on training policies in Unit 2 of EUCAP Sahel Niger noted how the updating of training material was part of their regular responsibilities.¹⁰⁸ Similarly, officers who worked on close protection or with the Special Intervention Unit in EULEX Kosovo emphasized that while there were established procedures that had to be followed by all members of the mission working in these areas, procedures were nevertheless updated from time to time to include new tactics or equipment brought in by new members.¹⁰⁹

Conclusions

This research article has opened up the black box of multilateral police missions by empirically investigating how police officers deployed abroad in missions engage in their day-to-day work. Drawing on an extensive set of qualitative interview data with European police officers and focussing on three research sites (EULEX Kosovo, EUAM Ukraine and EUCAP Sahel Niger), the article outlines how these officers navigate environments which differ considerably from those of their work back home. Police officers often have extensive discretion in conducting their daily work in-mission, especially when it comes to developing new training or introducing new policing practices. They actively make use of this discretion by falling back on their domestic policing experience, their experience in previous missions and the experience of mission colleagues. Here, our research partly confirms earlier accounts that emphasize the importance of officers’ national professional backgrounds in how they conduct police work abroad. However, that is not the whole picture. Officers are not always free to carry out their work as they see fit. The level of discretion within the missions is curtailed by host state preferences, policies and histories as well as mission-internal lock-in mechanisms, which reduce the available room for manoeuvre over time. Moreover, as missions settle into established patterns of “how things are done”, the level of discretion available to officers declines further.

Our focus on the emergence of transnational police practices on the ground highlights that multilateral police missions serve as sites where we can observe the emergence of transnationalized policing practices that are formed, over time, by successive cohorts of police officers from different countries. Rather than constituting globally shared policing scripts that guide how police officers carry out their work abroad, the transnational policing practices we observe are more limited in scope: they are specific to the mission they emerge in and continue to evolve within this mission over time. For instance, close protection in EULEX Kosovo has evolved into a transnational policing practice in the sense that it rests on the experience of consecutive cohorts of European police officers. But that does not mean this transnationalized approach extends beyond the mission itself. Tellingly, a German police officer, who had worked on close protection in Kosovo in the past and then returned to the country a few years later, was surprised to see that the tactics used by the close protection unit had changed to such an extent that he would not have had the confidence to work in the unit again.¹¹⁰

On a more general level, our research suggests that everyday police work in missions is primarily shaped from the ground up and depends to a large extent on the active engagement of police officers on the job, often in very difficult and volatile contexts. Future research should therefore take the agency of professionals involved in direct or indirect forms of international intervention seriously,¹¹¹ while also analysing conditions that constrain individual action.

Given the nature of our empirical material, our findings predominately relate to the realm of relatively small EU CSDP missions. An interesting avenue of further research would be to extend this investigation to the larger case universe of the United Nations. Is everyday police work within UN missions similarly characterized by the mix of factors we found in multinational European policing? Or have top-down efforts like the SGF and associated guidance material led to a harmonization and broader transnationalization of police work within the context of the UN, where individual officers’ personal experience and professional background plays less of a role?

The research presented here also has important policy implications. First, extending the investigation to UN missions could provide policy makers with valuable insights about the impact of top-down harmonization efforts like the SGF on everyday police work in missions. Secondly, the importance of different types of experience for everyday work in missions and the emergence of mission-specific transnationalized police practices does not bode well for organizational attempts to “learn lessons” for the future.¹¹² Our findings suggest that any attempt at improving the missions’ work through learning across missions will face the challenge that each new mission, and perhaps even each new cohort of mission members, comprises a unique amalgamation of individual experience and policing practices that are bound to the specific context in which they emerge. While our research suggests that lock-in effects can lead to the stabilization of mission-specific policing practices over time (“the EULEX way of doing things”), the emergence of broader transnational police practice across missions seems less likely. In the end, this might be good news for those who caution against applying “one size fits all” solutions to complex problems of peace- and statebuilding.

Acknowledgements

We thank Fabian de Hair and Fynn Manthey for their outstanding research support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (grant numbers: SCHR 1264/2-1 and FR 3506/2).

Notes on contributors

Philipp Neubauer

Philipp Neubauer (ORCiD, Twitter) is a researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH) and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg. His current research is focused on the role of police officers in, and the training for, international missions.

Cornelius Friesendorf

Cornelius Friesendorf is head of the Centre for OSCE Research (CORE), Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH). He previously worked as senior advisor for an EU police reform support programme in Myanmar and as researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.

Ursula C. Schroeder

Ursula C. Schroeder (ORCiD) is director of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH) and a professor of political science at the University of Hamburg. She was previously a professor of international security policy at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Notes

1 Andreas and Nadelmann, Policing the Globe, 4.

2 Tanner and Dupont, “Police Work,” 663.

3 Greener, “The Rise of Policing,” 183.

4 See e.g. Karlsrud, “The UN at War”; Berdal and Ucko, “The Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping.”

5 Foradori, “Cops in Foreign Lands”; Goldsmith, “‘It Wasn’t Like Normal Policing’”; Harris, “Building on Sand?”; Tanner and Dupont, “Police Work”; Saati and Wimelius, “Building Peace Abroad”; Duclos and Jouhanneau, “To Serve and Survey.”

6 See Ioannides and Collantes-Celador, “The Internal–External Security”; Laan et al., The Future of Police Missions; Moore, “CSDP Police Missions”; Eckhard, International Assistance; Hunt, Rhetoric versus Reality.

7 Loader in Beek et al., Police in Africa, xv.

8 E.g. Bowling and Sheptycki, Global Policing.

9 E.g. Autesserre, Peaceland; Goetze and Bliesemann de Guevara, “The ‘Statebuilding Habitus’.”

10 Bronitt and Stenning, “Understanding Discretion,” 320.

11 Friesendorf, “Police Assistance,” 383.

12 Marenin, “The Goal of Democracy,” 165.

13 See Schreyögg and Sydow, “Organizational Path Dependence,” 325.

14 Tanner and Dupont, “Police Work,” 665.

15 Witzel, “The Problem-Centered Interview”; Ahlin, Semi-Structured Interviews.

16 For a brief discussion on the use of video-conferencing systems as alternative to in-person interviews see; Janghorban, Roudsari, and Taghipour, “Skype Interviewing.”

17 Bueger and Gadinger, International Practice Theory; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, “Interpretive Research Design.”

18 Harris, “Building on Sand?”; Duclos and Jouhanneau, “To Serve and to Survey”; Paolo, “Cops in Foreign Lands.”

19 Tanner and Dupont, “Police Work”; Distler, “Intervention as a Social Practice.”

20 van der Lijn and Smit, “Women in Multilateral Peace Operations.” [Figures specifically regarding the police are not available.]

21 Bowling, Reiner, and Sheptycki, The Politics of the Police, Ch. 8.

22 Bowling and Sheptycki, Global Policing, Ch. 4.

23 Sheptycki, In Search of Transnational Policing; Nadelmann, Cops across Borders; Bowling and Sheptycki, Global Policing; Goldsmith, Crafting Transnational Policing, 11–15.

24 Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 7.

25 Beek, Producing Stateness.

26 Peake and Marenin, “Their Reports Are Not Read.”

27 Greener, New International Policing, 118.

28 Autesserre, Peaceland; Goetze and Bliesemann de Guevara, “The ‘Statebuilding Habitus’”; Goetze, Distinction of Peace; Daho, Duclos, and Jouhanneau, “Political Sociology.”

29 Anderson et al., Policing the European Union; Andreas and Nadelmann, Policing the Globe, Ch. 2.

30 See, among others: United Nations, Code of Conduct; United Nations, Basic Principles.

31 United Nations, Police in Peacekeeping Operations, 2.

32 Hunt, Rhetoric versus Reality, 618; see also, Billow, What We Can Learn.

33 United Nations, Community-Oriented Policing.

34 See, among others; OSCE, Guidebook on Democratic Policing.

35 Bowling, Reiner, and Sheptycki, The Politics of the Police, 169–70.

36 On Australia, see Chan, “Changing Police Culture,” on West Germany, see Bayley, Patterns of Policing, 41–7.

37 Wilson, Varieties of Police Behavior; den Heyer and Prenzler, Civilian Oversight of Police; den Heyer, “Filling the Security Gap”; Mawby, World Policing Models; Casey, Policing the World.

38 Mawby, Models of Policing, 18.

39 Bayley, Patterns of Policing, 46.

40 Wilson, Varieties of Police Behavior.

41 den Heyer, The Role of Civilian Police; Goldsmith and Harris, “Out of Step”; Tanner and Dupont, “Police Work.”

42 Duclos and Jouhanneau, “To Serve and Survey.”

43 Hills, “The Possibility of Transnational Policing,” 301.

44 Friesendorf, “Police Assistance”; see also, Eckhard, International Assistance.

45 Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 7.

46 Hunt, Rhetoric versus Reality, 618.

47 Interview, Swedish police officer, 12/02/2021, online.

48 Interviews, 04/05/2021, Germany; 12/05/2021, online.

49 Interview, Norwegian police officer, 12/05/2021, online.

50 Interviews: 29/08/2019, Germany; 01/10/2019, Pristina; 10/10/2019, Kyiv; 13/10/2020, online.

51 Interview, Portuguese Gendarme, 15/01/2021, online.

52 Interview, Danish police officer, 14/10/2019, Lviv.

53 Interview, German police officer, 09/10/2019, Odessa.

54 Bayley, Changing the Guard.

55 Interviews: 26/09/2019, Pristina; 30/09/2019, Pristina; 01/10/2019, Pristina; 09/10/2019, Kyiv; 09/10/2019, Odessa; 10/10/2019, Odessa; 13/10/2020, online; 12/02/2021, online.

56 Interview, German police officer, 14/09/2020, Germany.

57 The EGF operates outside the framework of the EU but gendarmes regularly deploy to EU missions.

58 Interview, Italian Carabinieri, 18/02/2021, online. See also interviews 02/02/2021, online; 22/08/2020, online.

59 Interviews: 18/02/2021, online; 30/11/2020, online; 15/01/2021, online.

60 Interviews: 29/08/2019, Germany; 10/09/2020, online; 09/03/2021, online.

61 Interviews: 26/09/2019, Pristina; 20/08/2020, online; 10/09/2020, online; 25/11/2020, online.

62 Interview, Swedish police officer, 09/10/2019, Kyiv.

63 Interview, Swedish police officer, 10/10/2019, Kyiv; see also interviews: 09/10/2019, Kyiv; 10/10/2019, Kyiv; 10/10/2019, Odessa; 16/07/2020, online; 20/08/2020, online; 13/10/2020, online; 15/10/2020, online; 12/02/2021, online.

64 Interview, Swedish police officer, 12/02/2021, online.

65 Interviews: 20/08/2020, online; 10/09/2020, online.

66 Interviews: 30/09/2019, Pristina; 18/08/2020, online; 20/08/2020, online; 22/10/2020, Germany.

67 Interview, Dutch police officer, 20/08/2020, online.

68 Interviews: 29/08/2019, Germany; 09/10/2019, Kyiv; 22/08/2020, online; 14/09/2020, Germany.

69 Interview, German police officer, 06/10/2020, Germany.

70 Interviews: 05/08/2019, Germany; 26/09/2019, Pristina; 20/08/2020, online; 28/09/2020, online; 06/10/2020, Germany; 22/10/2020, Germany.

71 Interview, Dutch police officer, 20/08/2020, online.

72 Interview, Slovakian police officer, 14/10/2019, Lviv.

73 Interviews: 26/09/2019, Pristina; 01/10/2019, Pristina; 18/08/2020, online; 20/08/2020, online; 10/09/2020, online; 28/09/2020, online.

74 Interview, Polish police officer, 15/10/2019, Lviv.

75 Interview, Portuguese Gendarme, 22/08/2020, online.

76 Interview, German police officer, 14/09/2020, Germany.

77 Distler, “Intervention as a social practice.”

78 Interview, German police officer, 14/09/2020, Germany.

79 Interview, German police officer, 18/09/2020, online.

80 Interview, French police officer, 13/10/2020, online.

81 Interview, Swedish police officer, 10/10/2019, Kyiv.

82 Interview, Romanian police officer, 15/10/2020, online.

83 Interview, Swedish police officer, 10/10/2019, Kyiv. See also interviews: 09/10/2019, Kyiv; 09/10/2019, Odessa.

84 Interview, Swedish police officer, 10/10/2019, Kyiv.

85 Interview, German police officer, 09/10/2019, Odessa. See also interviews: 10/10/2019, Kyiv; 15/10/2020, online; 25/11/2020, online.

86 Interview, German police officer, 18/09/2020, online.

87 Interview, German police officer, 18/08/2020, online.

88 Ciorciari, “Sharing Sovereignty,” 2.

89 Marenin, “The Goal of Democracy,” 165.

90 Interview, Danish police officer, 14/10/2019, Lviv.

91 Interview, Swedish police officer, 09/10/2019, Kyiv.

92 Interview, Portuguese Gendarme, 22/08/2020, online.

93 Interviews: 22/08/2020, online; 14/09/2020, Germany; 18/09/2020, online; 30/09/2020, online; 18/02/2021, online.

94 Interview, German police officer, 30/09/2020, online.

95 Interview, Swedish police officer, 10/10/2019, Kyiv.

96 Interview, Swedish police officer, 09/10/2019, Kyiv.

97 Interview, Swedish police officer, 10/10/2019, Kyiv. See also interview 01/10/2019, Pristina.

98 Interview, French police officer, 13/10/2020, online. See also interviews: 01/10/2019, Pristina; 20/08/2020, online.

99 Interview, German police officer, 20/08/2020, online. See also interview 01/10/2019, Pristina.

100 Interview, Swedish police officer, 01/10/2019, Pristina.

101 Interviews 26/09/2019, Pristina; 01/10/2019, Pristina; 20/08/2020, online.

102 Interview, German police officer, 20/08/2020, online.

103 Interview, Swedish police officer, 01/10/2019, Pristina.

104 Interview, German police officer, 30/09/2020, online.

105 Interview, Slovakian police officer, 14/10/2019, Lviv.

106 Interview, German police officer, 18/09/2020, online.

107 Interview, French police officer, 13/10/2020, online. See also interviews 09/10/2019, Kyiv; 28/09/2020, online; 15/10/2020, online.

108 Interview, Romanian police officer, 15/10/2020, online.

109 Interviews 10/09/2020, online; 28/09/2020, online.

110 Interview, German police officer, 10/09/2020, online.

111 Daho, Duclos, and Jouhanneau, “Political Sociology.”

112 Smith, “Learning in European Union Peacebuilding.”