Common goals for border officials increase collaboration around the Baltic Sea
The officials that work at European countries’ borders along the Baltic Sea coast collaborate towards a common goal – to combat cross-border crime. This is shown by new results based on field work, documents, and interviews with intelligence and operative staff at authorities in a number of countries.
The study focuses on how officials at different authorities in the countries around the Baltic Sea collaborate on border control. The study focuses on the everyday work and the handling of problems at border controls taking into account the social and cultural backgrounds of the officials. Sometimes the collaboration is made difficult because of bureaucratic problems. However, despite this, the results indicate that there is evident collaboration in the everyday work that is carried out. It is believed that this is a result of a common understanding for the purpose and goal of working together to fight crime in the Baltic Sea region.
The article is part of the results from the project "Turnstone", a study of the collaboration between border police and coast guard in the Baltic Sea region, carried out by Goran Basic from Linnaeus University and Sophia Yakhlef and Malin Åkerström from Lund University.
The project is funded by the European Commission. The aim of the project is to, based on empirical material (field studies, photographs, interviews and documents), map out and analyse how the staff at various border authorities experience, interpret and define the organisational, cultural, historical and judicial differences between border authorities. In addition, the aim is to map out and analyse how travelers experience, interpret and define free movement within the region in relation to border authorities.
Contact information
Goran Basic +46470-70 89 59 / goran.basic@nu.se
Tove Nordén, communications officer +4670-367 14 53
More information
Yakhlef, S., Basic, G., Åkerström, M. (2016). Policing Migration: Described and Observed Cooperation Experiences of Police and Border Guards in the Baltic Sea Area. Journal of Applied Security Research, Vol. 12, no 1, 117-140 p.