This month I had the great pleasure to welcome at the Università di Trento a multidisciplinary group of scholars to discuss timely research on „Police Cooperation and EU Integration“. This was the main event organized within my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral research „Law Enforcement mobilities Across Borders“, financed by HorizonEurope.

For now, I simply want to express a huge thank you to all participants – speakers, attending students, SIS colleagues and staff. It was my pleasure and honor to provide the space for our discussions! Christian Kaunert, Saskia Hufnagel, Toine Spapens, Nils Filius, Vanessa Ugolini, Alessandra Russo.

The next day, the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and the European Migration Network (EMN) Luxembourg hosted the Conference „40 years of Schengen: People, Borders, Politics“. While celebrating the Schengen anniversary, the impressive line-up of speakers critically assessed if control at the internal Schengen borders is „calling into question the European achievements of open borders“.

I take the occasion to share two infographics previously published on the blog of the UniTrento School of International Studies: in a new full-page English version, “Schengen: quo vadis?”

My thanks to the ZHdK Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, area Knowledge Visualization, for providing me in my MSCA project with the opportunity to learn how to bring the skills and the value of science and knowledge visualization closer into the field of social science research and dissemination (Michael Stuenzi, Daniel Röttele, Niklaus Heeb). I am learning and of course any shortcomings are mine.

Why this? In the 1995 landmark publication Policing the European Union, Malcolm Anderson, Monica den Boer et al remarked how the development of “new forms of law enforcement co-operation for a ‘borderless Europe'” is not just a matter of administrative and legal technicalities, but that this is about so much more! And yet, how to translate technicalities ACROSS disciplines; and how to translate those research elements that DO matter to the public, TO the wider public?

“Schengen: quo vadis” (I) is a first contextual output of more infographics and visualizations to come and which will be part of a visual research output on this homepage.

Curious? Stay tuned!

LEmobAB – Law Enforcement Mobilities Across Borders. Funded by the European Commission, HORIZON 2021, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship,  Grant Agreement No 101063837.

POLICE COOPERATION & EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: developments in policy, law and practice

Multidisciplinary Perspectives

School of International Studies, University of Trento (IT) 

Date: 10th of June 2025

PROGRAMME

9:30: Welcome by Stefano Schiavo, Director of the School of International Studies

SESSION I: 10:00-12:00: Developments in police cooperation through the lens of multiple analytical perspectives

Christian Kaunert, University of South Wales, Director of the International Centre for Policing and Security; Dublin City University: Europol and the supranationalisation of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.

Saskia Hufnagel, University of Sydney Law School, Co-Director of the Sydney Institute of Criminology: Harmonisation at all costs? An evaluation of norm-making processes in EU law enforcement cooperation.

Monika Weissensteiner, University of Trento, School of International Studies: The EU Police Cooperation Code Initiative: an analysis of the “complex web” through interlegality, space and temporality.

Discussant: Alessandra Russo, University of Trento, School of International Studies

SESSION II: 14:30–16:30: Operational cooperation & information exchange

Vanessa Ugolini, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society: European information exchange mechanisms as media of cooperation.

Toine Spapens, Tilburg University Law School, Department of Criminal Law: Practical law enforcement cooperation in the Dutch-Belgian border area: recent experiences and developments.

Nils Filus, Police Academy Apeldoorn / Canterbury Christ Church University, MScP: Possibilities, aspirations and realities in Dutch-German cross-border police cooperation.

Discussant: Monika Weissensteiner, University of Trento, School of International Studies

Final event of the project LEmobAB – Law Enforcement Mobilities Across Borders. Funded by the European Commission, HORIZON 2021, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship,  Grant Agreement No 101063837.

What have on-farm pig slaughter in Catalonia, the internal borders of the Schengen area, informal resistance in Colombia and village court magistrates in Papua New Guinea in common? More than one thinks!

I would have said very little, if it wasn’t for having participated in a fascinating panel on law and policy in occasion of the 2024 Annual Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists kick-off online day.

My paper: Policy and law, temporality and space: “studying through” Schengen, Panel On/doing power: policy, law and the difference it makes, convened by Hummel A. and Oancă A, Annual Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA).

The Marie Curie Alumni Association  is global network of researchers and fellows of MSC Action!

The annual conference of this round birthday in 2024 is hosted by the MCAA Italy Chapter! 

I have had the pleaseure to prepare the event as part of the Communication Team of the MCAA Italy Chapter, in which we launched a social media campaign presenting the work of MSCA fellows in Italy. For a little peek behind the curtains of busy preparations, check out my interview with members of the organising committe for the 36th MCAA NEWSLETTER!

What are topics important to the Italy Chapter which you are looking forward to seeing addressed on the occasion of the 10th anniversary conference?

Riccardo Biondi, Chair of the Italy Chapter:  “Some of the main objectives of the Chapter are boosting the career of young members and improving networking and communication within the association and outside. For this reason, we will support the involvement and collaboration with industry and academies to enable the members to analyze the pros and cons of both working environments, to get new contacts and to exchange ideas and experiences.”

 “Visualizing legal pluralism, space and border reconfigurations in Europe. Possibilities and criticalities when engaging in map-making, based on a case study on cross-border police cooperation”. International Security Cluster, SIS, University of Trento

The School of International Studies at the University of Trento has several Clusters, amongst which the International Security Cluster. For spring 2024 we are organizing several appointments in which colleagues are presenting work-in progress for discussion and feedback.

It was a pleasure to discuss possibilities, criticalities and limits of mapping visualizations with my colleagues and discussant Ragazzi Francesco from Leiden University. My paper or better said my presentation of mapping explorations through different tools allowed me to share work in progress and to discuss and evaluate the added value and limit of using these methods in analysis, as well as in a possible future output.

As a researcher – particularly within a Horizon Europe (HE) project -, learning how to engage in science communication is important, even an HE obligation. This also relates to LEmobAB’s third research objective, that is to engage in visual communication of science oriented towards public scholarship. Admittingly, I have never been a blogger and I am not much into social media.

This year I had the opportunity to participate in a one-day-training organised by the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) dedicated to research blogging in science communication. A Marie Curie fellowship project is not only about carrying out research and working on one’s topic, it also enables researchers to foster their transversal skills. So, ‘science-blogging’ it was. There is always a first, and I found it somewhat hard to define a specific target audience for my first blog experiment. I decided to write a blogpost – combined with a visualised science “fiction” story – about the topic of my Marie Curie fellowship research on law enforcement mobilities across borders.

Here it goes: The mobility rights of unusual “cross-border workers”: police

Weissensteiner, M. (2023), ‘The mobility rights of unusual “cross-border workers”: police’, blogpost, Marie Curie Alumni Association blog (ISSN 2958-7867), https://medium.com/marie-curie-alumni/the-mobility-rights-of-unusual-cross-border-workers-police-efc1a8a4c388