Policing global hubs – A study of the Norwegian airport and maritime port security environments

Abstract

The topic of this dissertation is the policing of global hubs, and it is particularly concerned with the security governance arrangements found at Norwegian airports and maritime ports. Employing a mixed-method design, the dissertation draws on extensive empirically grounded research from case studies of Oslo airport, the port of Stavanger and the port of Kristiansand, which are three important hubs in the Norwegian infrastructure for facilitating flows of people and things. This dissertation sets out to explore collaborative and network structures among policing agencies as a way to approach complex matters relating to security, and the organizations’ experience of security projects in their everyday life, with particular emphasis on their perceptions of different mentalities, logics and interests and efforts to reconcile them. By combining perspectives on collaboration, experiences of security practices and guiding mentalities, this study seeks to contribute by providing new empirical and conceptual insights into plural policing and security governance from the Nordic context. More importantly, the dissertation aims to develop and advance our thinking on the policing of global hubs – which are distinct and unique institutional environments that have yet to receive proper criminological attention. Thus, to make this possible, the overarching research question that this dissertation sets out to address is How do agencies producing and delivering security and policing services in global hubs experience and perceive their collaborative relations and everyday practices when dealing with matters of security? The dissertation is made up of four articles, and although the articles can be read separately as independent contributions to the literature on plural policing and security governance, they also connect in certain ways and, taken together, shed light on the overall research objective of this dissertation, and contribute to expand and advance the current literature. Articles one and two are concerned with examining and mapping collaborative relations, and make clear that the notion of public-private is crucial to the way agencies view themselves in comparison with others, and to how they seek to position themselves in collaborative efforts by referring to this divide. The mapping of relations reveals a distinct social structure and highlights how power is connected to the relational position of agencies within security networks. The third and fourth articles take a broader approach to unpacking security governance by giving attention to agencies’ experiences and understanding of policing and security practice in global hubs. The third article underlines how the dimension of “everyday practices” is important for making sense of the way in which agencies respond to exceptionality and develop strategies to cope with it. The last article shows how policing and security agencies are affected by, and seek to adapt to, the demand for efficiency and speed that is intrinsic to the commercial system prevailing in global hubs.