Skip to Main Content
907
Views
15
CrossRef citations to date
Altmetric

Articles

Intervention as a social practice: knowledge formation and transfer in the everyday of police missions

 
Translator disclaimer

The problematic nature of biased knowledge held by professionalized experts and aid workers in statebuilding is already recognized. Yet we still lack understanding on knowledge formation and transfer in the everyday of statebuilding operations. I argue that the actors on the ground gain their knowledge in powerful and self-referential socialization processes. The aim of this article is to reconstruct via an interactionist theoretical framework, how German police officers, deployed for a maximum of 12 months, perceive and interpret other actors and their mission in Kosovo, how they gain this knowledge and how it relates to their work. I draw two conclusions: first, the police officers, both experienced and newcomers, share mostly negative attitudes towards local actors and the mission. Second, the most important mode of knowledge formation and transfer behind these similar attitudes is the informal interaction with experienced interveners and local actors, not official trainings or information. These informal modes of knowledge transfer have a limiting effect on the practice of statebuilding. New knowledge is difficult to gain in short-term deployment, instead stereotypes are reaffirmed. Interveners are not independent units and the social practice of an operation cannot simply be planned; it develops on the ground in specific forms.

Additional information

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the reviewers of the manuscript and Miriam Bach, Stephen Foose, Melanie Hartmann, Judith von Heusinger, Maria Ketzmerick and Michael Höttemann for comments and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Werner Distler is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Conflict Studies (University Marburg) and the Collaborative Research Center (SFB/TRR) 138 ‘Dynamics of Security’. His research focuses on the everyday practice, processes of securitization, and authority building in interventions and statebuilding.

People also read