Transnational Policing Cooperation in the Republic of China (on Taiwan): Developing an Agency-structure account

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the Republic of China's (ROC) daily transnational policing cooperation at the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) from a frontline officer's stance. By developing an agency-structure framework based on Bourdieu's theory of practice, I present a peculiar type of transnational policing cooperation - national policing against transnational crime (TC) - in four orderly steps. 1) I proposed an agency framework by taking a ROC insider's stance into account. I selectively reviewed the insiders' preferable literature on policing cooperation to make a suitable framework to host ROC practices. By arguing that the literature does not address the police as (semi)autonomous practitioners, I proposed an agency framework. 2) I completed an agency-structure framework based on reviewing police culture and Bourdieu's theory of practice. I concluded this framework to address the habitus-field-practice relation and its evolution trajectory in terms of time and space. Practice can be represented by the following characteristics, and the habitus-field-practice relation should be maintained: A. Fields (as a factor of space): Police officers' agency (as a field) of police organisation (as an organisational field) of or in connection with the government (as a national policing field) of the state (as a national bureaucratic field and/or a national field of power) to cooperate with foreign counterparts (as a transnational policing field). There are relations between the positions in the fields each actor holds: police officers, police organisations and government, state and foreign counterparts. Additionally, the influence of field is the exercise of power by the dominant to drive the dominated to do practice. B. Habitus (the research focus): Collective habitus as practiced knowledge (re)constructed under the influence of fields is embedded in police officers' agency. C. Evolution (as a factor of time): Police officers initiate the evolution of practice to succeed in an internal competition for dominating agency (as successfully integrating existing and new parts of habitus) to further succeed in external competitions for dominating fields. Driven by habitus (embedded in agency) and accommodated by fields, practice can thus evolve from its past (or existing) status to its present (or future) status. In addition, the past (or existing) status of practice can influence its present (or future) status over time and across fields. 3) I selected ethnography as my research method by arguing that ethnography should be regarded as a more suitable method than interviews as a way to capture the dynamic nature of agency and structures. 4) I deployed the agency-structure framework to analyse both literature-based data and field notes to track and mediate the past and the present status of practice to portray the contemporary ROC transnational policing cooperation. ROC transnational policing cooperation as national policing against TC can be understood as follows: 1) The contemporary ROC is still influenced by Confucianism and imperial legalism to some degree but in a different way - a bureaucratised Confucianism and imperial legalism. 2) Contemporary Taiwan's rule of law is structured by a peculiar arrangement, as Taiwanese residents dominate the authority by law but allow legally dominant actors (including elected legislators, governors and presidents; recruited judges; and promoted high-ranking bureaucrats) to enjoy more autonomy and fewer constraints while exercising power driven by bureaucratic habitus and bureaucratised Confucian-legal habitus. 3) CIB detectives have different styles of habitus organisation relating to transnational policing cooperation. Detectives in one operational unit act as the investigatory operative for transnational practice, whereas detectives in another operational unit construct three conflicting identities: the liaison officer, the investigatory operative and the request processor. How managers exercise

Date of Award	31 Dec 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	William Hebenton (Supervisor) & Juanjo Medina (Supervisor)