RT Article
T1 Anomie and collaboration in intelligence and operational police and border guard work in the Baltic Sea area: in-group mentality and construction of the other
JF Policing and society
VO 32
IS 9
SP 1103
OP 1123
A1 Basic, Goran
A1 Yakhlef, Sophia
A2 Yakhlef, Sophia
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1820794180
AB The purpose of this ethnographic study is to analyse the collaborative work among intelligence and operative personnel from different border authorities in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. The aim of this article is to illustrate and discuss how transnational/inter-organisational police identities and trust come into being through officers sharing a construction of specific significant ‘other’ – in this case that of ‘Russian spies/crooks’. Cross border collaboration among police organisations is made difficult as police officers tend to be suspicious of outsiders and colleagues that they have not yet worked with. In this study, we explore how trust among a specific group of officers was however built by contrasting themselves against not (just) criminals but an enemy that could be found among them or have an influence over their colleagues, namely Russia or Russian spies. We refer to this category as ‘norm-dissolving Russian’. This category included concepts such as being a spy, a criminal and a potential military threat, and became a sort of ‘Other’ that reinforced their own in-group bonds. Intelligence and operative personnel present in the analysed collaborative sequences create their professional identities by contrasting themselves with these categories. Drawing on ritual theory as well as symbolic interactionism this article discusses how an in-group feeling and idea of a higher moral order was created and re-created during their collaborative work. Morality is thus created and re-created in the encounter with people that are associated with being the ‘enemy’, present in the situation both in physical and invisible form.
K1 document analysis
K1 Qualitative Interview
K1 Field work
K1 field notes
K1 Identity
K1 Morality
K1 operational police work
K1 Enemy
K1 Russia
K1 Stereotype
K1 in-group
K1 Anomie
K1 Ritual
K1 Interactionism
K1 Ethnography
K1 intelligence police work
K1 Norm resolution
DO 10.1080/10439463.2021.2023525