International Security Management

This chapter argues that modern-day global challenges invite us to rethink the meaning of the concepts of security and safety. While these two concepts have long been seen as rather distinct, both in academia and in practice there is a need to integrate the two. This chapter provides reasons why such integration is relevant and important, and provides insights into the consequences of the rise of global security and safety issues for the governance of these issues.

Safety is normally understood as an ‘avoidance’ goal, the objective being to reduce risks and harms. Can it also be understood more positively, as an ‘approach’ goal? If so, what would that positive motivation entail, and what benefits might it bring? The world has never been safer, yet levels of stress and worry are increasing. Governments are spending heavily fighting crimes and hazards but in addition to that, we should focus on promoting aspects that make people feel safe. If the focus is on threats and crime, then the focus is on the absence of safety, not on the presence of feeling safe. And feeling unsafe is intrinsically bad even if that fear sometimes leads to sensible preventive action. Feeling safe, on the other hand, is intrinsically good. Sometimes it is instrumentally harmful to feel unrealistically safe. But, there is also some plausible evidence in support of the idea that we can make places safer by making people feel safer in them. We propose here a ‘Positive Safety Lens’ (PSL) as a complement to traditional ‘avoidance’ approaches to safety. We identify seven attributes of the PSL and discuss their potential benefits for safety research and safety promotion.

Although security and safety can both be traced back to antiquity, security was only recognised as a serious problem in the 1980s. At that time safety had already an accepted set of methods and solutions. The ‘new’ problem of security was therefore initially treated as a variant of safety and treated analogously, the predominant approaches being security by design, by prevention and by protection. Security, however, differs significantly from safety both because security breaches are intentional rather than haphazard, and because the secondary effects are more serious than the primary. This chapter considers these differences and concludes that security is not something that can be managed by itself or in isolation. The challenge is instead to manage for security so that a system or an organisation remains secure.

In this article I focus on the trends in security, safety and criminal justice in the Netherlands which emerged from 23 volumes in Dutch on Police, Armed Forces, Safety and Security, Detention, Enforcement, Judiciary, Fire Brigades, Forensic Sciences, Terrorism, Crisis, Crime, Intelligence and Security Services, Crises in the Netherlands, Risk, Integrity, Mayor, Enforcement, Acute Medical Care, Conflict, Fraud, Violence and Veteran issues. In eight propositions I formulate my perspective on safety, security and criminal justice in general and more specifically in the Netherlands. The extent and intensity of safety and security and the way they are ensured are key indicators of the quality of a society.

Current discussions on the ways people experience safety in urban public spaces are often characterised by a negative view—the absence of unsafety—and rarely include positive sensations related to the safety experience itself. Some scholars have argued that this could be an artefact of more or less standardised methods used in the field. In fact, perceived safety and fear of crime are most often studied as disconnected from people’s everyday lives and practices, with little room provided for research participants to formulate what safety actually means to them in their circumstances. Although standardised approaches provide us with an intensity of the safety experience, all underlying ideas, meanings, sensations and perceptions are commonly forced into a single numerical rating. In order to gain insight into these aspects of the safety experience, we present the results of a bottom-up explorative approach in which participants were asked to freely describe what it means for them to feel safe. We detected three main themes: the absence of negative aspects, the presence of positive aspects and not having to think about safety. In our final section we reflect on the importance and usefulness of these findings for management, policymaking and academia.

This chapter investigates how the words journalists and media outlets use contribute to inaccurate or harmful narratives around migration; and how these narratives can construct narrative fences around assumed ideas of powerlessness. It also explores how every party involved in the migration field can engage in more ethical linguistic practices. As Europe faces the biggest migration of people since World War II it has often been referred to as a fortress in the methods it has taken to secure its borders. This has in turn been reflected in narratives around swarms and perceived threats to the so-called European way of life. The lexicon used by everyone from journalists to aid-workers and academics can influence the perception of a need to protect European boundaries. This chapter will examine how we can contribute to honest and fair narratives, which bring down the fences built to encourage ideas of us and them.

This essay is a methodological reflection on conducting research in extreme contexts, the impact of this on researchers’ emotions, and its subsequent use in theory building. The essay draws on personal experience of conducting research on the Greek island of Lesbos in the aftermath of the European refugee crisis in 2017 and 2018. The essay adds to the literature on reflexivity, theory building and metaphors, spanning both the macro perspective of global grand challenges and the micro perspective of individuals’ emotional burdens. It proffers the metaphor of a “settled emergency” to describe a multi-faceted situation encountered in the field that can also be found in many organisational contexts in which an unbearable situation is perpetuated by informal dynamics.

A useful way of analysing how safety and security issues are handled across different cultures is offered by looking at them through the prism of Huib Wursten’s Mental Images (Wursten and Lanzer in The EU: The third great European cultural contribution to the world. Academia, 2013), a framework that takes Hofstede’s four classic value-dimensions (Hofstede et al. in Cultures and organizations. McGraw-Hill Education, New York City, US, 2010; Hofstede in Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions and organizations across nations. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, Canada, 2003) and combines them into six different styles of culture. In addition to that, Japan offers a seventh and different style of culture (Wursten in Mental images of culture: A perspective to understand misunderstandings in politics, business, religion and… to make some sense of the challenges in today’s confusing world. Academia, 2017). In each of these styles, culture influences (a) how safety and security issues are considered; (b) how they are handled in terms of (i) prevention, (ii) making corrections and (iii) taking measures to avoid repetition in the future and (c) how cross-border collaboration may occur to increase effectiveness. Institutions must increase their awareness of how culture influences safety and security issues. Special attention is required to enhance international collaboration efforts, which can have frustrating results when cultural differences are not taken into account. Institutions that operate in different geographies and employ multinational teams need to become aware of how different national cultures impact on their ways of working, so that they may become more effective and efficient in each operating environment.

Building common capacities and capabilities for security depends largely on the existence of a common or shared security culture. The question is if a common and shared security culture is possible or if it is a phantom of our imagination. Security culture implies that there is a shared set of values and behavioural norms within the wider society on how to approach security. In our today’s world, societies are not unipolar, they have multipolar centres of opinions, values and norms. In this article, I explore security culture from the risk management perspective and argue that through exploring and understanding security risks we, collectively, create the foundation for building societal resilience in a multipolar community. This chapter provides some practical recommendations towards building common security culture through the prism of risk management. It proposes a novel concept of ‘risk footprint’ as a mechanism to build effective and functional safety and security risk assessment and risk governance mechanisms.

The management of safety and security is a process with nooks and crannies. It goes far beyond what is academically deemed irrefutable. The fact-based response to calamities is just one piece of the puzzle. Dealing with what might be and cannot yet be factualised is another. Facts collide with concerns. The proposition here is that facts, concerns as well as their collision need to be incorporated in the management of safety and security. Civic engagement in dealing with the risks associated with the urban condition then is not an option but a vital asset. This calls for the exploration of new domains. Consider art. The question is how art—both as end products and as the process of making them—informs us about the management of safety and security as a collective creative process. When dealing with matters of concern, the truth is not in facts but in the iconic representations of daily life challenges. Diving into that truth opens up a complementary array of tools that are worth ‘artfully’ experimenting with. To illustrate practice in which that happens, a neighbourhood in a Dutch city is introduced. Also, a concise description of the tools used is given.

In the twenty-first century, as a consequence of globalisation, international interconnectedness of nations and the market system, the number and seriousness of environmental risks are increasing. In the past, security challenges mainly stemmed from economic, political, social or religious reasons; environmental aspects played no or only a very indirect role in the emergence and escalation of conflicts. Today we face serious climate change-related environmental risks. This chapter uses the case study of Syria to demonstrate how climate change impacts have affected (inter)national security, directly and/or indirectly, resulting in social, economic and environmental conflicts, without appropriate institutional response. The main aim of this chapter is to promote the understanding of interconnections between influencing aspects and the complexity of our whole economic-social-environmental system, as well as to draw lessons from good and bad practices in approaching climate change-related conflict situations, so that the management of such security challenges becomes more professional, socially acceptable and inclusive in the future. As a conclusion, the chapter recommends feasible methods and solutions to prevent and tackle climate-related security challenges. Wide-scale recognition and understanding, followed by multi-stakeholder decision-making and actions are necessary to foster the development of resilient and safe societies, which can evade the environmental crisis.

The loss of cultural heritage whether through natural disaster, armed conflict or extremism can become a uniting force, intensified by the feeling of worldwide solidarity. On the other hand, cultural heritage can fuel a growing divide among communities and become a source of conflict that sometimes results in violent clashes. The relationship between cultural heritage and peace and security has been widely acknowledged. Nonetheless, as the example of the Netherlands shows, this is not automatically translated into security policies and concrete safety measures. This chapter argues that the lack of acknowledgement and integration of cultural heritage in security policies can be problematic.

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the US and other attacks in the EU, academic interest in drivers of radicalisation and in preventive-defence policies has significantly increased. The literature offers several explanations and solutions, however further empirical research is still needed. This chapter is divided into three parts: the first part investigates original research studies related to Islamic radicalisation and terrorism. Studies included in the first part of the chapter are original quantitative and qualitative primary research published in peer-reviewed journals. In the second part, the authors focus on the main European strategies aimed at dealing with Islamic radicalisation and terrorism. In particular, innovative strategies of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) are highlighted with multiple examples from the European Union. In the last part of the chapter, we focus on the Italian case, which is experimenting with an innovative approach fostering cooperation among the State, local authorities and intermediate bodies (e.g. volunteering associations, religious communities and cultural organisations).

Both an economic activity and a crime, the sale of goods in violation of applicable law, known as illicit trade, has recently been enhanced by globalisation and digitalisation, which have helped to embed illicit flows of goods in regular ones. This is a dangerous and fast growing phenomenon that companies cannot ignore. On the one hand they could involuntarily be associated with or even support this crime either when purchasing goods stemming from illicit trade or when providing financial or logistical support to illicit traders. On the other hand they could be harmed by the unfair competition of illicit trade when counterfeited, tax evading or dangerous, non-compliant products challenge their regular sales. Companies have to respond. However, they should not do this alone. They can work together and with national and international public organisations. Nevertheless responding to illicit trade is not just about avoiding being an accomplice of that crime or addressing irregular competition, it is also about ensuring corporate social responsibility. Illicit trade does not just harm the operations of companies, it has a wider social and economic impact; Markets are disrupted, consumers are confused and could buy dangerous counterfeited products, while states cannot collect taxes and social charges.

As the concept of the smart city gains attention among academic, industry and bureaucratic circles, policymakers and their partners are exploring its powers in many domains of city management. The city of Rotterdam (The Netherlands) is no exception, taking up the mantle of digitised governance with great fervour. However, urban safety management, there and everywhere else, remains seriously underrepresented as one such domain of application. This is a problem, since safety and its management pre-eminently bring out the most pressing ethical aspects of data-driven technologies (such as matters of privacy and social justice). To work towards a solution, we review the academic literature around smart cities and safety in general, analyse the commercial and policy discourses informing smart city initiatives around Rotterdam specifically, and take a look at some actual ‘smart’ urban safety practices in the city, which are not publicly qualified as such. In light of these analyses, we argue for a systematic and strategic integration of safety into the smart cities conversation in order to foster a more transparent, deliberate and therefore more democratically legitimate smart city.

While there is a plethora of surveillance technologies in public space, they are hard to see, as they are sometimes literally hidden, or they have become such a common part of everyday surroundings that they escape conscious observation. Through this invisibility the smart city and its surveillance technologies escape public awareness, critical reflection and democratic debate. In this chapter we discuss several ways of raising awareness about surveillance technologies. We show how artists and activists have engaged in cultural performance to bring surveillance in sight; we review a number of instruments of participatory action research that critical scholars have introduced. These performative and participatory instruments to expose surveillance technologies do have an immediate effect, however it is a temporal one and one would need additional efforts to move discussions away from individual responsibilities to collective ones and from individual awareness to political agenda-setting. This directs us, as participatory action researchers, towards examining how the few political conflicts around urban surveillance technologies have emerged and played out, and towards designing new interventions for political representatives and their constituencies.

A new generation workforce is seen to be changing the nature of work at a rapid pace. This new workforce differs from older generations as they are tech-savvy, prioritise flexibility and perceive their jobs as ways to reinvent themselves. In response, the idea of a ‘9-to-5’ job has been declared obsolete by many leading companies and replaced by flexible working policies and remote and virtual office environments. Both public as well as private organisations are seen to be looking for new paths to staff talent, coordinate teams and provide attractive working environments. Yet, what is often overlooked is the security implications of this new workforce. Our research found that security policies and procedures in organisations often do not include a specific approach towards the new generation workforce despite the unique set of risks that accompanies their way of working. We argue that organisations need to reconsider their security strategy to ensure that their workforce thrives in a complex world of uncertainty. By integrating security as an employee service, making security awareness experience-based and putting employee engagement at the centre, risks are not only mitigated but new opportunities for a more safe and secure workforce can be seized.

Security in general is part of human history. Business security applies to a narrower scope as security now pervades most economic activities. It took its current form in the twentieth century under the pressure of industrialisation and globalisation. At first, it was about protecting physical assets. In modern businesses, Chief Security Officers (CSOs) aim much wider at embedding security issues within organisations, encompassing numerous functions beyond physical assets. Their success lies in establishing the value of their role as leaders for mitigating risk and therefore enabling more profit. Professional experiences between public and private sectors are additional assets evolving towards more concern for social responsibility. All stakeholders are therefore concerned by what is happening in the sector, as it reflects deep shifts in our societies. Finally, it appears that Ulrich Beck’s thesis (1992) that modern societies have become ‘risk societies’ is true even within businesses: most companies today are dealing with societal risks they helped to create by their activities. Through corporate social responsibility they try to address this challenge as a way to protect their profitability. Corporate security is at the crossroads between safety and societal concerns, and hence contributing to a safer world.

Stakeholders in the private security industry are present in the most diverse social areas—at supermarkets, at small and large (sport/music) events, in local public transports, at airports, in schools, to name only a few. In some of these, the presence of private security has developed into an unquestioned matter of course—at least as long as nothing happens. But the industry does not always have a good reputation. Certain stakeholders in private security have called this matter into question in a number of infamous incidents and the negative headlines associated with them. Such incidents put an entire industry under general suspicion of consisting only of violent, poorly trained and poorly paid security personnel. However, the (inter)national security industry is much more complex than it presents itself to the average citizen in everyday life and extends beyond the often-perceived shady sides, even if these are not to be denied. Therefore, a closer look at the industry with the aim of highlighting challenges and opportunities is worthwhile.

This chapter describes essential prerequisites for a comprehensive and integrated analysis of international security management in a modern police force. Using the Croatian police as an example, the relevance of education with a special focus on the mental resilience of the police force, the value of evidencing practices through sound research and effective data security management are addressed. The concept of police subculture and the functioning and organisation of the Croatian police are also presented for the purpose of providing the background for discussion. Finally, examples of some successful international research projects are presented.

The twenty-first century is said to be a data-driven century, and unsurprisingly, ‘AI’, ‘Big Data’, ‘Predictive Analytics’, ‘Pattern Recognition’ and ‘Machine Learning’ are frequent buzzwords in the current security management discourse. Also, new business models in the data industry are exerting a revolutionary (‘disruptive’) influence on existing processes and infrastructures. This means digital transformation is an imperative for each organisation, security agencies included. What does this mean in terms of leadership and decision-making? One of the main challenges is to foster forward-looking skills, capabilities and competencies. This comprises a redesign of curricula and education programmes at universities and academies to prepare leaders for their new professional environments and AI-based ecosystems in the days to come. This chapter thus argues that to meet the huge challenges of the data-driven era, a broader methodological perspective is needed.

In this chapter, we focus on the opportunities and challenges of a specific application of artificial intelligence (AI) within the police organisation, i.e. the application of AI to the crime reporting process. Various considerations underlie the use of AI by the police. The overarching shared objective of the entire security domain is one of making society safer. Reporting crimes plays an important role in that context. AI offers several opportunities to achieve this objective. However, the implementation of AI involves more than just adopting a new technology; it extends to organisational aspects and social interactions. Therefore, it is of great importance that police officers, as well as other actors in the security chain and citizens, are receptive to the use of AI in the crime reporting process. We consider the opportunities and challenges from an organisational and management perspective and conclude by identifying avenues for further research and giving recommendations for practice.

Managing how new digital technologies are integrated into different contexts has become a key component needed for effective international security management. This chapter focuses on rethinking our approach to the integration of digital technologies within (cyber)security work. Most analyses of security take for granted a problematic split between technologies involved in securing specific contexts and the humans involved with or operating such devices. By shifting to a practice theory approach, we offer a more holistic view of security by examining not only the implementation of technologies or human factors but also how this affects the meaning these practices hold. We highlight how this comes into being in the healthcare domain by drawing on interviews with trainers who are actively involved in providing this type of change management. Trainers relate to the daily practices of healthcare staff they train by taking into account the materials they work with, the skills they need and which meaning these practices may hold for them building on this. As such, trainers can be conceived of as mediators of practices and a practice theory approach offers a clearer sense of how to implement security change management.

The population structure in vulnerable residential areas is often characterised by ethnic heterogeneity, a large number of welfare recipients, a high unemployment rate, an above-average number of single parents and an inadequate level of education. Such deprived neighbourhoods suffer from several social problems and often from a high crime rate with robberies, assaults, break-ins, vandalism, etc. The increase of parallel societies with subcultures and non-statutory power groups (mafia-like gangs, rocker groups, etc.) limits the effectiveness of the police and the municipality’s public order offices, which are often viewed with suspicion. These factors influence the criminogenic structure on the one hand and the requirements for safety and security activities on the other. Police and public services face the challenge of activating citizens, involving them in crime prevention strategies, motivating them to support prosecution by reporting crimes and becoming witnesses and testifying before police and in court. This chapter analyses the sociological background of deprivation and vulnerability, applies criminological theories in policing strategies and takes into account the need for an inter-agency approach to promoting and ensuring security in such areas.

The role of the intelligence services is to collect, process and analyse information in order to inform policymakers about conflicts and threats. More specifically, in public safety, this activity gives informational support for criminal investigations and analysis in order to understand criminal developments. However, what would be the informational requirements of an information service based on the positive safety lens? In this chapter, we contextualise these informational requirements with a specific event: the spread of violence in society. We discuss how the role of the police offers a remedy, in order to fight the symptoms of this phenomenon. Conversely, we suggest that improving happiness conditions could be the vaccine, making people less susceptible to committing violence. With this in mind, we argue that from a positive safety perspective, at the strategic level, informational requirements are related to indicators of happiness and feelings of safety as well as to predicting conditions to improve happiness. At the tactical level, we argue that police forces should consider that criminal networks are interconnected with other levels of social networks.

In order to respond to key challenges in safety and security, individuals and organisations must often collaborate across workplace boundaries, working with people and organisations from different nations and sectors, and with different disciplinary/functional backgrounds. However, research suggests that these kinds of relationships are often fraught with ingroup versus outgroup divisions, which disrupt coordination and hamper operational performance. Against this backdrop, this chapter takes an identity perspective to shed light on the causes of these divisions and potential solutions that may facilitate better relations and cooperation across workplace boundaries. The chapter incorporates recent academic literature in the safety and security domain as well as relevant empirical research to provide evidence-based recommendations. In particular, I discuss how organisations may support positive cooperative actions through communication and rhetoric, through the adoption of human resource management practices related to selection and training, and through boundary-spanning processes and leadership roles.

Sociotechnical systems are rapidly becoming more and more complex due to technological advancements and increasing interconnectivity. Today, many of these systems are embedded in temporary organisations (TO). The complex interconnectivity characterising a TO increases the risk of adverse work situations emerging in unexpected ways. This chapter focuses on TOs operating in high-hazard environments involving high capital assets and operations in which failure can have severe consequences—here referred to as complex temporary organisations (CTOs). Based on an empirical study aimed at understanding how these organisations sustain their operational reliability, this chapter discusses the everyday realities in a CTO with regard to collaboration, unexpected events and governance. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the organising complexity in a CTO and illustrate that by focusing on how these organisations work rather than how they fail, a world of untapped learning opens up, offering generous scope for cross-sectoral learning.

Current scenarios reveal new types of ever increasing dynamic and aggressive threats, which lead to a move from a traditional security management to a strategic vision for protecting citizens and assets in a more comprehensive way. In such an environment, the risk related to incidents involving the use of CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) agents must be considered a cause of potentially devastating consequences. Non-proliferation and disarmament operations can make an essential contribution to combat terrorism by preventing or reducing the access of non-state actors or non-authorised persons to chemicals, biological and nuclear dual-use materials but this could be not enough. Illicit proliferation of chemical weapons, clandestine production of toxins and biological agents, ‘dirty bombs’ and trafficking of fissile material are just some examples of the use of CBRN agents for terrorist purposes. This chapter argues that, in order to address these issues, the integration of human, instrumental, technological and financial resources should be improved and reinforced. For that purpose, an effective strategy to mitigate and reduce the risk of using CBRN materials requires a high level of coordination across national agencies. Further development of interagency CBRN defence capabilities remains a top priority for global security.

Global security and safety are changing rapidly, and we are witnessing many advances in technology to combat known threats. These often-reactive solutions include outsourcing by governments to the private sector of many tasks previously limited to the domain of the police and the military. When considering how best to respond to a frequently changing security landscape it is best to keep it simple and manage this through the phases of before, during and after. This approach will ensure that no aspect is overlooked. This chapter considers some important aspects of planning and response. It examines elements of partnership working between the public (government) and private (business) sectors and gives case studies where it has not been a resounding success (as in the 2012 London Olympic Games). It also gives a more positive and current example of engagement between government and private sector companies in seeking joint solutions for reducing the threat of terrorism in crowded places. Undoubtedly, there will continue to be opportunities for improved government and private sector partnership working, provided they are underpinned by the notion that security of citizens is a first duty of any government and this cannot be outsourced without appropriate checks, balances and audit.

Public–private Financial-Intelligence Sharing Platforms (FISPs) have contributed to changing the mindset between law enforcement agencies and regulated entities in countering money-laundering. This chapter reflects on opportunities that intensified public–private cooperation offers to increase the possibilities of discovering more effective remedies against crime. The chapter also provides insights into the complexities and obstacles of joint-efforts and illustrates these challenges via the case of the founding-process of the newly established Serious Crime Task Force (SCTF) in the Netherlands. The SCTF initiative aims to process and produce more actionable intelligence on the activities of professional money-launderers, via intensified, co-located cooperation between banks, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and various Dutch law enforcement agencies. The SCTF case illustrates how cooperation in PPPs can also create tension between participating organisations when it crosses established formal positions, responsibilities and other established interests.

Cooperation and networking as well as co-ordinating national and international prosecution and prevention efforts continue to pose a significant challenge to all police forces worldwide. In the face of the present security threats, security systems worldwide need to develop their security architecture in such a way as to enable the necessary interdepartmental as well as inter-agency cooperation, which meets both requirements: compliance with legal regulations and flexibility for necessary ongoing adjustments. What is needed is a common understanding of challenges, tasks, responsibilities as well as an atmosphere of trust. This chapter illustrates the challenge of cooperation, focusing on the German approach to counterterrorism.

Security-related topics like terrorism, large scale involuntary migrations and natural disasters are grounded in deep-rooted and complex societal problems. In order to promote safety, security management seeks to understand the nature of such problems, the contexts and systems in which they evolve, their different stakeholders, and corresponding relational dynamics. This chapter addresses those security challenges, which can be classified as wicked problems, and describes the complex systems in which they evolve. For such problems, systems thinking and complexity leadership are determinant for effective security management, as enablers of multi-stakeholder learning and innovation. Based on a multi-stakeholder methodology developed at Nova SBE (called wave-making) we propose a process that enables the development of co-created, practical and innovative solutions for wicked security challenges.

In this chapter we introduce a practical way to innovate and democratise research on policing. To reach this aim we call for police, professionals, citizens, policy makers and academics to form research groups and work together on policing. We set the stage by using the Anatomical Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt as a mirror and metaphorical reference. We describe how that imagery inspired our thoughts about forming these research groups. We not only link these ideas to present debates in the scientific community, but also come up with a suggestion for organising scientific research into policing in another manner. We have been inspired by old guilds as an interesting meeting point for scientists and interested civilians and professionals to build a community. A community can only be formed when members get to know each other. We describe how people with different (professional) backgrounds can come together and built a research community in four stages. We are not keen on institutionalising these collaborations up front. First, they need to grow roots. For us, these roots are getting to know each other in an initial research project. Only then—as in the painting by Rembrandt—the group will be enlightened.

Current environmental and societal challenges increasingly require students in higher education to develop boundary-crossing competence. That is, the ability to effectively operate, communicate and co-create knowledge in a transdisciplinary context. However, little experience is available in how to design such programmes. The current chapter presents a case study in the development of an M.Sc. in International Security Management. We share our experiences with a design approach that can be characterised as transdisciplinary and team-based educational design in a blended setting that includes the use of online synchronous communication.

This chapter discusses the European Joint Master’s in Strategic Border Management (EJMSBM), a joint degree coordinated by Frontex and implemented by six European higher education institutions. The joint degree is a unique living example of strategic cooperation in action, in the classroom and in the operational field, as a response to the emerging need to ensure a strategic management approach to EU border security challenges in the context of increasing migration pressure. The research reveals the value of international cooperation and networking via higher education for the development and maintenance of human resources to overcome ever growing challenges to EU border security. The chapter presents exploratory research findings based on the views of representatives of EJMSBM alumni and EU Member States’ and Schengen Associated Countries’ border and coast guard agencies.

There has been a growing need for highly qualified leading personnel in International Police Missions (IPMs). The German police has a particular interest in filling these positions with its own officers. To achieve a stronger representation of senior police officers in IPMs, the organisational framework for teaching and training Germany’s police managers had to be restructured and national and international training networks to be strengthened. Strategic reviews and evaluations are key for improving IPMs’ performances; yet, they have not been established as common standards in missions. There is a lack of systematic analysis of police missions’ effectiveness, including the transferability of effective measures undertaken in IPMs. To improve IPM-related education, training and research, the German Bundestag decided to create an International Police Relations (IPR) section at the German Police University. The section offers teaching and training activities on international police work and has embarked on developing a robust and feasible methodology for evaluating IPMs. While the IPR-section has only been fully operational since 2019, national and international stakeholders already appreciate the section’s efforts in teaching, training and research fields. This indicates that the section meets current needs and interests and is on the right track to accomplish its mandate.