Transnational Policing

Conclusion

Despite Nigeria's uneven record, a degree of occupational commonality exists within the artificial environment of UN operations, just as it exist outside, too; organisations such as UNPOL (and Interpol) could not otherwise function. However, understanding is built on functional issues and technical jargon, rather than the norms emphasised by Sheptycki.

Further, the accommodation and networking that undoubtedly exists between officers is not synonymous with a transnational ethic. If anything, it suggests that personal relations and networks are important precisely because of the strength of cultural differences between police (compare Larsson 2006).

Occupational commonalities and differences are particularly evident when it comes to working definitions of effective policing and the levels of force required to achieve it, for this is determined not by international pressure but by the role force plays in an officer's home environment.

Contra Alpert and Dunham, violence is not rare, and training will not ensure that officers respond effectively using minimal violence. Force is assessed in a culturally specific manner, and the prospects for developing a liberal-style transnational policecraft are low.

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This is mainly because transnational policing seeks to promote a specific philosophy and normative approach as much as techniques and procedures, and the transfer of its preferred models is overlaid with political assumptions about the right 'professional' trajectory.

The goal is restructuring and rebuilding indigenous police 'to an acceptable level of democratic policing' (UN Police Division 2007, p. xi), and the perspective of its advocates is that of the European centre-left. Policing is a means to promote conflict resolution, and to facilitate or manage a new order consistent with liberal principles.

Indeed, its objectives appear to include strengthening or facilitating a rights-based universalising order, which requires the modification or replacement of existing forms of social order. Functional effectiveness is therefore judged according to its alignment with Western notions of good policing.

On the other hand, liberal consensus is often outweighed by disagreement on what constitutes effective policing. For policing is always understood from national perspectives and officers regard the practices and norms of their home force as appropriate. It could not be otherwise when British, Iranian, South African and North Korean police trained the Uganda police (New Vision 2007), Chinese riot police joined a Brazilian-led UN force in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and Indonesian police were committed to Darfur.

In practice, global interdependence (and the less controversial process of internationalisation) encourages Western academics and organisations such as UNPOL to assume that liberal structures and standards apply whereas they may not. Police in developing regions may reflect rationalities and causalities that are different to those of Europe or North America, and their definitions of effective policing may be disconnected from individual morality and the shortcomings of state institutions. Also, transnational policing has potential disadvantages. Democratic policing models may, for example, contribute to ineffectual policing by imposing inappropriate or unsustainable schemes. They may even constitute 'a new form of exploitative, entrepreneurial neo-colonialism', structuring change in ways that are favourable to the geostrategic interests of key Western states. This may benefit senior Southern officers sent on training courses in France, the UK and USA, but it rarely improves the lot of ordinary officers, and its influence on domestic policing is at best superficial.

This suggests that current modes of transnational policing are not primarily intended as a means for ensuring effective policing. Neither are they concerned with creating police capable of dealing with organised crime, trafficking or armed robbery per se. Enhancing accountability and responsiveness may, of course, ensure that the police concerned gain public support, and therefore do not need to rely on force, but transnational policing, like reform projects more generally, ignores the nature and purpose of police institutions in the South, downplays the underlying causes of insecurity (Fayemi 2001), and assumes that international agents can manipulate political and social forces (Luckham 2003). For such reasons, developing a transnational policecraft presents significant intellectual and empirical challenges.