Policing and paradiplomacy: Police Scotland’s international activities in the context of Scotland’s foreign policy agenda

• In Event: POLWG Panel 27. Policing, politics and Human Rights in national and international contexts

Abstract

This article draws on my PhD research exploring the interconnections between policing, nation-branding, and nationalist politics in Scotland. It reflects on the “branding” properties of Police Scotland’s human rights-based policing approach. While Police Scotland has yet to formalize a human rights framework, it has not shied away in recent years from positioning itself as an expert on the matter, and from trying to “export” the approach. Taking from International Relations and Criminological approaches, I offer a critical perspective on these developments. I argue that the police organization’s efforts to export its human rights approach fit with a wider Scottish nation-branding effort, in which contemporary narratives of progressiveness serve to build Scotland’s reputation as an international “player,” as well as to create a distance to Westminster politics. By examining police and government communications, I show how the language of human rights interacts with the language of sustainability and Good Global Citizenship to brand Scottish policing and, by extension, the Scottish nation. I connect these observations to Dellepiane and Reinsberg’s discussion of Scotland’s international development agenda as a case of paradiplomacy. The authors argue that Scotland’s international development efforts include significant symbolic and institutional elements that support the Scottish Government's domestic political agenda. I contribute to this discussion by examining how Police Scotland’s international activities fit this theorization, and in doing so challenge common assumptions about why and how the police engage in international policing activities.

Author

• Markus Buderath, Bielefeld University