Both the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement encourage bilateral police cooperation between member states. Increasingly the EU Commission has problematised the differential configuration of bilateral agreements and the multiple options given in EU law as a “complex web”, said to hamper an effective law enforcement cooperation. As envisaged in EU Security Union Strategy (2020) and in the Schengen Strategy (2021), the EU Police Cooperation Code (2021) aims to address some of these issues. Focusing in particular on cross-border police cooperation instruments, such as cross-border hot-pursuit and surveillance, joint operations and joint centres, in 2022 the European Council adopted upon proposal of the Commission a Recommendation on operational law enforcement cooperation.
Engaging with contemporary developments, LEmobAB pursues three objectives.
By connecting bottom-up empirical insights and situated experiences from selected border-regions with the study of ongoing legislative developments on EU and national level, this study contributes to filling an important knowledge gap in the identification of variables and meanings of enhanced cross-border cooperation.
On theoretical level the project develops the interface between legal anthropology, international relations and global criminology. It pursues the objective to develop empirically grounded interdisciplinary conceptual tools to enhance understanding of reconfigurations of public security practices within processes of ‘globalisation’ and ‘Europeanisation’ and of security cooperation’s contribution to shaping the European space.
In its applied dimension, the project promotes practices of knowledge visualisation in analysis and communication, among which mapping visualisations will be one type of output.