POLICING-MOBILITIES IN THE BORDER-STRIP: CROSS-BORDER POLICE COOPERATION AND VIAPOLITICS AT THE INTERNAL SCHENGEN-BORDERS OF THE EU AREA OF FREEDOM, SECURITY AND JUSTICE

The establishment of a Schengen-area of “freedom of movement” without border control is deemed a major achievement of European integration. Developments since 2015 have shown a renewed salience of internal borders: several countries have introduced temporary (maintained) border control, but also adjacent border-regions are increasingly invested with strategic importance. Intensified (national) border-area police-checks (art. 23 Schengen Borders Code) and enhanced bilateral police cooperation were also recommended by the European Commission as possible “alternatives” to border control, inter alia to counter so-called “secondary movements”. Both the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and explicitly the Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement (CISA) encourage bilateral police cooperation between member states, foreseeing particular measures for countries sharing a common border. This dissertation examines the intersection of such so-called cross-border police cooperation (CBPC) with the control of differential mobility rights. Specifically, this study concentrates on joint police centres/PCCCs, (joint) border-area patrols, and bilateral simplified fast-track readmissions. Multisited ethnographic research combined fieldwork with officers in several member states (2017-2019) and the study of policy, laws and document sources. The study fills gaps that are both of scholarly and political importance, and contributes to theoretical debates on legal pluralism, security and (b)ordering. CBPC is conceptualised in this study as policing-mobilities in the border-strip. Legal pluralism and interlegality (Boaventura-de-Sousa 1987) are analytical tools suited to a context in which the mobility of police across borders takes place within hyperlegalised and multinormative spaces. This enables to engage with, and to go beyond, what in policing scholarship and policy is often described as the “fragmented legal terrain” of police cooperation (e.g. Sheptycki 2001, p.153). Negotiations of (legal) orders - plural in scale, field and temporality - and the interdependency between law-as-text and as-practice are analysed by examining the institutionalisation and spatial-legal regimes that regulate CBPC and by discussing qualitative fieldwork data of officers’ experiences and (interpretative) practices regarding analytically differentiated generations of border-area measures. In explaining why and how the border-strip has turned into a viapolitical (Walters 2015) strategic zone, it is argued that the policing powers in the border-strip are deemed capable of providing a mediating solution to the ‘dilemma’ of how to enforce differential mobility rights, but they are also invested with the hope of providing a spatial (re)solution (Delaney 2003) to conflicting forces within the reform of the Dublin system and to border-struggles at the heart of the EU order. By placing policing-mobilities into the legal, interpretative, as well as broader operational and longterm historical-political context, this study addresses, for example, the role of border-strip diplomacy in uniform, how an ethos of a ‘joint task’ plays out in joint patrolling, and how a specific approximation between border-area and border control materialises through “spot [and] check”. Migratisation is proposed to allow for a complementary view upon securitisation. Ultimately, by analysing re-configurations of border(-area) police-work at the crossroad of social science and law, this dissertation advances situated and timely insights into transformations of governance and power within the political and legal order of the EU