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In 2022 the European Council adopted upon proposal of the Commission a Recommendation on operational law enforcement cooperation, addressing in particular cross-border police cooperation instruments, such as hot-pursuit, cross-border surveillance, Police and Custom Cooperation Centres and joint patrols. In leading to its proposal for a new “EU Police Cooperation Code”, the Commission had problematised a “complex web” in the legal realm, said to hamper an effective law enforcement cooperation.
In this presentation I propose an analytical framework for the study of cross-border police cooperation, by taking developments in policing across internal Schengen borders as empirical case. Three steps will outline the added analytical value of considering cross-border-police cooperation as policing-mobilities within plural legal orders. First, whilst police cooperation is frequently described and analysed as “interaction”, I argue that both operational cooperation as well as information exchange concern practices of mobility and their regulation. Second, zooming into the spatial-legal border-strip, I argue that criminological socio-legal analysis of what has been described as a “patchwork quilt” or “fragmented legal terrain” - problematised as “complex web” by the EU Commission -, can be enhanced with conceptual tools developed in anthropological studies of legal pluralism, attentive also to the relation between law, space and practices. Third, by providing empirical examples from law-as-text and law-as practice, emerges how a focus upon situated developments in policing sheds light into ongoing re-configurations of power and governance, borders and sovereignty. This contribution is based on findings from a concluded qualitative PhD research in cultural and global criminology (2021), combined with preliminary thoughts from ongoing research.