“LEmobAB – Law Enforcement mobilities Across Borders” is a research project that investigates developments in cross-border police cooperation in Europe.

Police cooperation across border-regions has a long history in Europe. Initially practised predominantly informally, cooperation has become increasingly institutionalised through bi- and multilateral agreements and later also on sovranational EU level. Today there are many bilateral agreements and EU laws regulating enforcement across and beyond national jurisdiction in the Schengen-area: a “legal patchwork” according to scholars, a “complex web” hampering an effective law enforcement cooperation, according to EU policymakers. 

Through a multi-method and multisited research design, LEmobAB connects bottom-up empirical insights from selected border-regions with the study of current legislative frameworks and of ongoing developments on EU level. It studies the interdependency of practices on different levels and the variables of enhanced cooperation. 

This research combines and advances approaches from legal anthropology and of policing- and security-scholarship in criminology and international relations. It  pursues three interrelated research objectives and related questions, giving form to the empirical, the theoretical and the appliead character of this project.