Anomie and collaboration in intelligence and operational police and border guard work in the Baltic Sea area: In-group mentality and construction of the other

The risks and insecurities emphasised in contemporary societies have given rise to diverse forms of policing, such as transnational, intelligence- and operative-based police collaborations. The purpose of this ethnographic study is to analyse the collaborative work among intelligence and operative personnel from different border authorities in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. The focus of this study is how the collaboration activities created an in-group mentality among the participating officers which was contrasted with another category, that of the “norm-dissolving Russian”. This category included concepts such as being a spy, a criminal and a potential military threat, and became a sort of "Other" that reinforced their own in-group bonds. Intelligence and operative personnel present in the analysed collaborative sequences create their professional identities by contrasting themselves with these categories. They build up a kind of group feeling and present a particular moral order that is created and re-created during their collaborative work. The norm-stable and the threatening norm-dissolving moralities are created within the interaction – especially when meeting work groups that differ from their own normative code. Morality is thus created and re-created in the encounter with people that are associated with being the “enemy”, present in the situation both in physical and invisible form.