ABSTRACT
This section of the volume turns to the specific area of police cooperation as a way of understanding the challenges to broader cooperation in intelligence practices as well as the potential for its success. While Chapter 6 looked at the factors underlying successful police cooperation efforts, this chapter focuses on one aspect of police cooperation – police liaisons – and explores their role in building up a cooperative transnational response to security issues, in particular, terrorism. The chapter begins with a discussion of the kinds of initiatives that have been and continue to be made in the area of security cooperation; a discussion broadly structured on the basis of the discussion provided in Chapter 1 of different realms of security relations (state-centric and multi-centric) as well as along a traditional dividing of actors into two broad types: liberal and realist. Exploring the resulting categories and the initiatives that can be grouped accordingly, reveals that the most progressive and arguably effective developments in combating transnational threats have been occurring in the realist state and multi-centric domains.
