Stacked Fields of Criminal Justice: The National Embeddedness of Transnational Policing

• Author: Mikkel Jarle Christensen
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677211039009
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Original Article

Stacked Fields of Criminal

Justice: The National

Embeddedness of Transnational

Policing

Mikkel Jarle Christensen

1

Abstract

This article investigates how transnational policing is structured by the embeddedness of partici-

pating police units in national fields of criminal justice. Empirically, the analysis zooms in on the

embeddedness and positionality of three different Danish police units that frequently engage in

transnational cooperation. Positioned differently in the national field of criminal justice, these units

have distinct capacities with regard to mobilizing and deploying material and symbolic resources and,

consequently, have distinct modes of engagement with transnational policing. Conceptually

expanding this insight to capture the structure of transnational policing more generally, this article

develops the concept of “stacked fields” to capture how transnational cooperation and power

relations are formatted by the national, institutional, and positional embeddedness of participating

police units and agents.

Keywords

transnational policing, transnational criminal justice, sociology, Denmark

In the second half of the 20th century and first decades of the 21st century, a range of new

initiatives have been developed to fight transnational crime. In addition to international institution

and law-building, national criminal justice systems developed new, and intensified already estab-

lished, patterns of transnational collaboration. At the operational level, as well as in the sharing of

intelligence, police forces increasingly collaborate across borders (Aas, 2007; Bowling & Sheptycki,

2012). This article zooms in on some of the Danish units involved in such cooperation and analyzes

how transnational involvement was formatted by their position in the national system. The structural

position of these units, linked to their perceived value and institutional clout in the national field of

criminal justice, allow them to deploy varying forms of symbolic and material reso urces. At a

structural level, transnational policing, and the power dynamics of such collaborations, is defined

1

Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Corresponding Author:

Mikkel Jarle Christensen, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 16, Copenhagen S 2300, Denmark.

Email: mjc@jur.ku.dk

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DOI: 10.1177/10575677211039009

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2022, Vol. 32(

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by the embeddedness of units active in such cooperation in their respective national fields of

criminal justice.

The multisited nature of cross-border crime control cooperation raises two main questions: How

do national fields of criminal justice structure how police units engage in transnational crime control

cooperation? and How can research best capture and conceptualize how transnational policing is

structured by this national embeddedness? Inspired by the concept of the “field” as developed by

Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), this article contributes a sociological analysis of the

structural relations between national fields of criminal justice as seen through the embeddedness and

transnational activities of three Danish police units. On the basis of this analysis, this article argues

that transnational crime control works and develops as a constellation of “stacked fields.” This

article develops the concept of stacked fields to enable the analyses of the power relations between

police units as formatted by their respective positionalities in distinct domestic systems.

Power relations between collaborating police units situated in different fields of criminal justice

can be both hierarchical and heterarchical. At times, geopolitical power relations (written into to

certain crime control efforts) can create and embed hierarchical patterns of cooperation that are

reproduced over time. In other cooperative efforts, more heterarchical power relations exist driven

by more operative or procedural aspects such as the channel of transnational collaboration chosen,

the case type, the characteristics of a certain case, or on who initiated and requested the cooperation.

The stacking of fields is dynamic and hinges on the engaged units and their respective positions in

different national field of criminal justice as well as what the cooperation concerns.

This article is structured in five sections. The first section outlines the theoretical foundations of

this article and the methods used, developing further the concept of stacked fields. The second

section investigates the development of serious crimes units in the Danish police, in particular in the

Police of Copenhagen. Folded into the Danish system a s part of a larger global push for drug

policing, the serious crimes units are seen as valuable by others in the system because it prosecutes

a large number of cases that have high institutional and political priority and are always in the docket

of the system. The third section analyzes the development of the unit responsible for international

deployments. The unit has been able to build a direct line of influence to the foreign policy

establishment but has been unable to build influence in the field of criminal justice. The fourth

section analyzes the development of the unit tasked with transnational communication and cooper-

ation. This unit is marginalized both from l ocal colleagues with operative capacit ies and from

ordinary police units in the police districts (the Danish police is organized in 12 districts). Faced

with this pressure, it has, so far unsuccessfully, attempted to build a role as a broker of international

knowledge to increase its ability to define heterarchical cooperation. The conclusion outlines the

main findings of the article and highlight its potential for further studies of transnational criminal

justice and policing.

Previous Scholarship and Approach of the Article

Competing theories have been developed to analyze how criminal justice unfolds beyond and at

the border of the state. Previous social science scholarship has developed four (sometimes over-

lapping) explanatory models for understanding transnational criminal justice and especially poli-

cing. These explanatory frameworks focus on institutions,norms,practices,orstructural dynamics.

With respect to institutions, Deflem (2000) has outlined the parallel bureaucratization of police

forces as an important factor in the creation of international police organizations through which

important forms of transnational cooperation flow. This idea is linked to wider theories of organiza-

tional isomorphism that show how inst itutions mimic each other (DiMaggi o & Powell, 1983),

something that has also been analyzed with regard to police forces (Burruss & Giblin, 2014; Carter,

2016; Giblin, 2006; Willis et al., 2007). Related historical research has demonstrated how police

292 International Criminal Justice Review 32(3)