Capital struggles in security networks: A theoretical framework

The normative bias in the literature

The language of policing—an activity now pluralized among a wide range of actors—has echoed a ‘collaborative discourse’ (Powell and Glendinning, 2002). Networks and partnerships have become common buzzwords. One expression used to describe this tendency is the nautical analogy proposed by Osborne and Gaebler (1993): the state should steer the boat of government and let society and the market do the rowing, conducting their activities according to the state's coordinates. Rather than governing directly, the state has taken on a regulatory role, forging alliances to govern ‘at a distance’ through other actors’ resources (Braithwaite, 2000; Rose and Miller, 1992).

Several scholars have reflected on such alliances, proposing concepts and typologies on co-production arrangements, and levers for third-party involvement (Bueger and Mazerolle, 1998; Grabosky, 1995). For example, Ayling et al. (2006) have proposed a typology of exchanges that enable the state to integrate public and private resources through coercion, sale and gift. As the authors acknowledge, this typology still fails to account for the fact that private actors are often the ones influencing, allying with or co-opting state resources. In general, networks have been seen to be more flexible than hierarchies, and more coordinated than markets when dealing with problems common to different actors, but which escape the purview of each actor in isolation. Their positive dynamics would enable the sharing and joint use of scarce resources to deal with such problems in a more effective way (Gerspacher and Dupont, 2007).

This literature ended up producing an optimistic image. The network concept often presupposes coordination among a set of actors, but many of them act with indifference towards others and prefer autonomy to interdependence. In addition to mutual benign neglect, there can even be outright conflict (Shearing and Wood, 2003). According to Powell and Glendinning (2002: 7), many accounts overlook that ‘the process of collaboration can generate more costs than benefits’, including negative dynamics that lead to governance failures. In fact, as Crawford (1997: 60) warned over two decades ago, partnerships place a high premium upon consensus, mutuality and the sharing of resources, but ‘competition, conflict and organizational autonomy remain essential characteristics of criminal justice’.

For Crawford (1997), some tensions can be viewed as desirable products of relationships, insofar as they reflect different goals that must be identified and weighed in constructive negotiations. However, negotiations are not always constructive, and their outcomes may be undesirable. Some ideas and practices are deeply antagonistic and perpetuate conflicts (Fosher, 2009). Although these reservations have been expressed for some time, many studies are still guided by a normative bias, as Dinchel and Easton (2020) have recently argued. Focused on the ways in which partnerships can be established, any conflict tends to be kept outside the scope of analysis and remains in the background of many concepts and typologies.

The limitations of existing frameworks

Some scholars have appropriated Bourdieu's (1986) field theory to take struggles into account (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011; Diphoorn and Grassiani, 2016; Dupont, 2004, 2006b). According to this theory, the ‘social space’ is composed of relatively autonomous ‘fields’. Each field is guided by its own principles, which establish what is at stake for the actors that are part of it, including the most valued resources, called ‘capitals’—economic, political, social, cultural and symbolic. The uneven accumulation and distribution of these capitals place actors in dominant or dominated positions in the field, regardless of any concrete relationship between them. The more equivalent the positions they occupy, the more similar actors will be in their ‘habitus’, in the sense of durable dispositions in ideas and practices, and consequently, the more viable their concrete relationships will be, including solidarities or rivalries (Bourdieu, 1986, 1989).

Dupont (2004, 2006b) was one of the first to appropriate these ideas to analyse ‘power struggles’ between the actors that make up networks in the organizational field of security, placing more emphasis on the concrete relationships between actors in networks than on the abstract relationships between the positions they occupy in fields. Dupont used the metaphor of capital to describe the different types of resources accumulated and mobilized by the actors in order to achieve, maintain or improve their positions. Since actors have different goals and accumulate capital unevenly, some dominant actors such as the police tend to adopt strategies seeking stability and conservation, while dominated actors, such as private security, seek change and subversion, although the struggles between them are kept within moderate bounds to ensure the general preservation of the network.

However, the way this metaphor has been applied does not focus on the negative dynamics from which struggles emerge. For example, in Dupont's work (2006b: 110), capital is portrayed as the resources available to actors who mobilize it instrumentally ‘to resolve’ power struggles, rather than the object and cause of conflicts per se. The metaphor is applied to categorize the resources deployed, invested and traded by actors to pursue their goals and jockey for better positions, especially when they feel their range of action is shaped or restricted by other actors. Nevertheless, this categorization does not focus on how some actors’ capital is shaped or restricted, or how its mobilization also shapes or restricts the other actors’ capital. Thus, the ways in which power struggles also emerge because of capital, and as a result of its mobilizations, are overlooked.

The capital metaphor has been also applied in studies carried out in the Global South (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011; Diphoorn and Grassiani, 2016; Lopes et al., 2022; Puck and White, 2021). Even when the cases studied are competitive and conflicting, this metaphor has more often been used to describe the resources available to actors than to shed light on how struggles are waged over these resources. The negative dynamics that put a strain on networks and partnerships have remained in the background.

Membership

Security networks are made up of formal and permanent, as well as informal and temporary relationships between and among equally numerous and diverse public and private actors specialized in authorization, delivery or both, with security as a primary or secondary function (Dupont, 2006a; Nøkleberg, 2020, 2023). Therefore, it is hard to establish their boundaries empirically. In practice, however, some capital struggles emerge precisely for membership in the network, when the actors’ participation and continuation are at stake. As new actors try to engage in activities claimed by long-standing actors, they seek to guarantee the conditions for staying on and avoiding leaving the security network.

The entry of the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into the port of Santos's security network illustrates how negative dynamics can emerge through network membership. An agency of the US Department of Homeland Security, the CBP is responsible for government programmes aimed at extending the USA's security zone beyond its borders. Through the Container Security Initiative (CSI), the CBP assigns its officers to foreign ports to assess the risks of containers bound for the United States, and if necessary, inspect them before they are shipped there. However, the programme got off to a rocky start because control of foreign trade, specifically goods flowing through the port, is the exclusive purview of the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service's Customs department. The arrival of the CBP created tension among Brazilian tax auditors, who asserted their right to inspect cargo as a matter of national sovereignty. According to Roberto, a former Brazilian Customs manager:

When we started the programme, I even had trouble explaining this to the tax auditors’ union, saying that we were not losing sovereignty or the legal right to inspect cargo in Brazil. In Brazil, it's the Brazilians who give the orders. So they [CBP officers] just send a message: if we agree, we’ll conduct this inspection.

It would be up to Brazilian tax auditors to authorize a container inspection requested by the CBP, as well as to supervise its performance—‘they will not conduct the inspection alone, which is a matter of sovereignty’, as Roberto said. In fact, other CBP activities, such as the exchange of information with PFSOs, were not controversial because they did not undermine the exclusivity claimed by Brazilian Customs.

A more recent example involves Recognized Security Organizations (RSOs), consulting firms authorized to prepare the risk assessment studies and security plans that all port terminals must have in place. Until the end of 2018, these consulting firms held a monopoly on the preparation of studies and plans, but the rules were changed to allow PFSOs and other employees of the terminals themselves to prepare them. According to Maria, an interviewee from São Paulo's State Commission for Public Security in Ports, Terminals and Waterways (CESPORTOS), ⁴ the body responsible for accrediting these companies, problems such as the high price and poor quality of the services provided resulted from the fact that ‘you had to hire someone to do it’, while the PFSOs of the terminals’ in-house security service already have the skills required to produce them—and, more importantly, ‘no one knows the terminal better than an insider’. With additional training for PFSOs, according to one of them, Fernando, the RSOs would fall into ‘disuse’.

Although the terminals can still outsource this service, the conditions for the RSOs to remain in the network were undermined. Some consulting firms fought back, exerting ‘tremendous pressure’, according to the CESPORTOS interviewee, Maria. Justifications for keeping them on were added to the legal arguments. Carlos, a consultant, disagrees that ‘insiders’ are better qualified to conduct risk assessments, as the advantage of outsourcing this service is precisely the impartiality of ‘outsiders’:

Every company has its core business, and there aren’t any structures within that core business aimed at analysing internal behaviour because the tendency is this: if you call your security head to ask him how security is going in your company, he’ll say it's doing great, because otherwise you’ll send him packing. So, you need to hire a specialized, impartial company to give you a non-conformity report. This is where the validity of these consulting firms that are external to the organization comes in.

Principles

Security networks are made up of a variety of actors and relationships. Security can be seen as the basic principle that brings them together and, consequently, guides the mapping of networks. Actors and relationships are included in the analysis as long as they are involved in security activities, including prevention, response and investigation of suspected or flagrant criminal problems (Patriarca, 2021). However, as the networks ‘are more incidental than teleological’, according to Dupont (2006a: 168), ‘[t]here is no shared overall objective or value but instead there are myriad overlapping interests’. In fact, previous studies have pointed this out as one of the greatest challenges to partnerships, since ports bring together public and private actors with mentalities, rationalities or logics based on potentially contradictory principles (Brewer, 2014; Marks et al., 2013; Nøkleberg, 2020, 2023). Therefore, diverging and not always reconcilable principles coexist and compete with those of security. Struggles emerge over the misalignment of these principles, which can be illustrated by cases in which economic imperatives undermine port security measures.

Public actors face these economic imperatives as their budgets depend on the government, and ‘this constraint can be an impediment in times of fiscal frugality’ (Dupont, 2006b: 97). For example, CESPORTOS members do not receive additional pay for participating in the commission, which does not have its own budget, and thus depends on asking for support and ‘begging for mercy from others’, in the words of Maria. As a result, some partnerships are established with a sense of resignation. The interviewee from Brazilian Customs, Lúcio, also criticizes these economic imperatives because of their possible harmful impacts on the quality of the services:

Today, there is a desire from the central administration, at a higher level, to reduce costs, not to hire more civil servants, so there is a tendency to try to downsize. But this has to be done very carefully, because you can’t dismantle what works well for the sake of economy. Sometimes, ‘what's cheap becomes expensive’. ⁵

Ultimately, this misalignment is not definitively resolved, and ongoing balancing is required (Nøkleberg, 2020, 2023). Therefore, in both the public and private sectors, security principles coexist and compete with different ones, such as those arising from economic imperatives. This misalignment of principles causes struggles to emerge between actors involved in the port security network.

Claims

Theoretical frameworks based on the capital metaphor focus on how actors accumulate and mobilize resources to attain, maintain or improve their positions. Thus, the focus of these frameworks is on actors’ attempts to claim different forms of capital. Claims are also dynamics of struggle, insofar as they oppose previous contestations, provoke new ones and lead to disputes between the actors. Some of these struggles are apparent in claims made by Brazilian Customs and the Port Guard.

Customs has juridical capital in the sense of legal powers and responsibilities, which are just as broad and even broader than those of many police forces, ‘despite a general assumption that they only play a minor support role in policing’ (Bowling and Sheptycki, 2012: 57). Lúcio, the interviewee from the Customs office in the port of Santos, takes a negative view of this assumption, as it overlooks the fact that ‘we are the ones who have initial contact with the goods; we are there on the front line’:

Customs is often seen as a bureaucratic agency, not an operational agency. And that's not correct. It's true that part of our activity is more focused on tax collection, you know? But that is not Customs’ main role. We do all the work here to combat contraband, combat piracy, counterfeiting, which is an aspect of what we do, this fight against the international traffic in narcotics, the protection of society. And this work is equally important; it has a close relationship with security.

Similar claims are made by the Port Guard, whose identity is often equated with that of other actors, and whose specific attributes are overlooked. According to João, the former Port Guard manager, for example, even senior executives of that organization ‘see the Guard as if it were private security’. More importantly, many ‘don’t value the work of the Port Guard as a public service’. While the performance of private security guards is limited to the surveillance of assets inside each terminal, according to this interviewee, the Port Guard ‘provides a public service, providing security for all port users’. Indeed, this is a common claim among public actors in other ports, who emphasize that they provide security as a collective good in line with the public interest, while security companies are motivated by profit and provide it as an exclusive good according to private interests (Nøkleberg, 2020). Thus, the Port Guard's purview, its juridical capital, should also guarantee its identity as a distinctly public actor—that is, its symbolic capital. However, this same remit should also set the Port Guard apart from other public actors with which it is equated, but which tend to be seen as less important. This is the case with the Metropolitan Civil Guards, who answer to city governments and provide services similar to private security guards in protecting the city's assets. This comparison is rejected because it minimizes the Port Guard's purview within the port, a highly specific critical infrastructure facility. This even involves an emotional side, according to the Port Guard manager Felipe:

I would not, let's put it this way, be so impolite as to associate the two Guards. I say impolite because I might hurt people's feelings, their susceptibilities; I could be very misunderstood if I tried to equate or compare them. There are always similarities, because they are directly linked to a public security issue. But port activities have a clearly defined scope; we have clearly defined responsibilities, so to speak.

In fact, this emotional side is also the basis of the essential differences emphasized by ’port police‘ officers, compared with ‘normal police’ elsewhere, as described by Eski (2016: 95): a kind of feeling, a ’maritimeness‘ that makes the call of duty stronger and gives them a distinctive identity.

In short, Customs and the Port Guard claim legal powers and responsibilities, which make up juridical capital that is relevant to their respective activities. They also claim adequate recognition as the legitimate holders of those powers and responsibilities—and, thus, their symbolic capital in relation to the other actors. Such claims often try to confront previous contestations that disparaged or rejected these actors’ capital. However, they are not always recognized and may not go uncontested.

Contestations

Instead of being recognized and accepted, the forms of capital claimed by actors in the port security network can spark new challenges and continue to be disparaged and rejected by others. Therefore, as a counterpoint to claims, contestations are another dynamic of capital struggles. Private security companies are illustrative of several types of contestations.

One of the most common concerns is the qualifications of security guards, especially the cultural capital ‘institutionalized’ through the training courses required by law. According to Rafael, the manager of one of these companies, security guards’ training prepares them to work in different places, including ports. This claim is contested by other interviewees from both the public and private sectors, including some port terminals, which are their clients. In their view, the security guards’ training does not qualify them to work in a high-risk classified area like a port, which is why they need to be ‘polished’ through in-house training, as said by the PFSO Caroline. She believes that ‘if an outsourced company wants to work in the port, they must train the security guards to act and work in the port’. This problem also seems to be common in other ports, as noted by Brewer (2014: 132): government representatives question the quality of service provided by their industry partners, their level of training, and ‘the overall competency of these actors as equals within the security network’.

Just as a claim to capital goes beyond mere ownership and has to do with the bearer's identity, contestations lead to distrust that impacts the actors’ symbolic capital. Some interviewees mention the dismantling of criminal schemes involving security guards to justify the need for caution—just as port police warned Eski (2016: 27) about some ‘dodgy’ security firms. As a precautionary measure, instead of outsourcing, many port terminals prefer to assign their own employees to activities that guarantee access to more sensitive information, such as monitoring centres. Even when they do outsource these roles, they occasionally ask for security guards to be replaced when they attract suspicion by failing strictly to follow operating procedures. The PFSOs at the terminals, who are often sources of information for the Federal Police and Customs, are also sometimes taken by surprise because ‘in a risk investigation, sometimes you don’t even know if a terminal employee is involved’, as the former Customs manager Roberto explained. In these situations, the scepticism and reluctance of public actors frustrate private actors (Nøkleberg, 2020). As the former PFSO Gustavo told us, even if they have made themselves available to the authorities, provided the necessary information and, thus, claimed symbolic capital in the form of recognition of their reliability, PFSOs sometimes complain that they feel they are treated more like suspects of crimes at the terminals where they work.

These cases shed light on the struggles that emerge from claims to capital that are contested instead of being recognized and accepted. In some cases, these contestations do not escalate into fiercer struggles: while they may challenge the qualifications of private security guards, for example, Port Guard respondents recognize similar limitations in their own cultural capital. In other cases, however, these contestations can escalate in the form of disputes over the same forms of capital.

Disputes

Instead of being recognized and accepted, the forms of capital claimed by certain actors can be contested by others. In some cases, the contestations arise alongside competing claims that generate disputes for the same capital. Whether implicit or explicit, these disputes can even underlie productive relationships between public actors who often conduct joint operations against international cocaine trafficking at the port.

As it has juridical capital, which guarantees it legal precedence over control of foreign trade flows, Customs performs risk assessments, checks the images of container scans and has teams to inspect cargo with the help of sniffer dogs. When cocaine is found, Customs officers prepare a Report on the seizure of substances and related drugs. However, according to Rebeca, an interviewee from the Federal Police, ‘they use the wrong term’, because ‘it's the Federal Police who “seize” the drugs’. Customs only takes precedence over the seizure of contraband, not illegal drugs, which is the purview of the Federal Police and one of its most distinctive forms of juridical capital. Therefore, she had spoken with Customs officers to ask them to stop opening containers without first calling in the Federal Police. That should be done the moment illegal drugs are suspected or found in a container. According to her, some Customs officers were not pleased with that conversation. This dispute was also mentioned by João, the former Port Guard manager, who passed on the information that the Federal Police had conducted a cocaine seizure and was criticized by the Customs officers who had found the drug and claimed recognition for the seizure—that is, they claimed symbolic capital through recognition of their activities, more than the juridical capital that guarantees their legal power. In fact, in João's view, most seizures are carried out by Customs, which is usually responsible for finding illegal drugs—while the Federal Police, although officially responsible for the seizure in legal terms, is not always ‘involved in the actual discovery of the drugs’.

The Port Guard itself is also involved in this dispute. In addition to supporting Federal Police and Customs operations, Port Guard officers occasionally catch attempted drug smuggling in the act when monitoring and patrolling the facilities, or when the terminals call them in because they suspect illicit activity. However, even if they are the first to arrive at the crime scene, stop the smugglers, locate the drugs and then call in the Federal Police, the Port Guard officers are not always recognized for their actions:

In one case, the Port Guard officers caught some drug dealers red-handed. And the Federal Police was closed in the middle of the night. So, they had to stay there on the docks, keeping an eye on those guys and five hundred kilos of dope. And you’re messing with a drug dealer … You wait an hour, a Federal Police car arrives, escorts [them] to the Federal Police area, and the next day the headline reads: ‘Federal Police arrest drug dealers.’

Despite the major role of the Port Guard, whose discovery of the drugs in this case arose from the fulfilment of the legal responsibilities that make up its juridical capital, according to João, ’the press reported that it was the Federal Police who seized it‘. Indeed, the Federal Police interviewee Rebeca also argues that even if joint operations involve all three actors in their respective ’spheres of responsibility‘, Customs does not conduct seizures, ‘much less the [Port] Guard’. In the case of Customs, specifically, in her view these claims aim to corroborate requests for danger-pay bonuses when they equate themselves with the police.

As other studies have noted, it is common for overlapping responsibilities to generate disputes between public actors who fight for ‘turf protection’ to obtain their government budgets (Brewer, 2014: 148; Marks et al., 2013). In these ‘battles for resources’, preserving the authenticity of a role also involves aspects such as pride, prestige and, in general, the authority to speak on behalf of something (Fosher, 2009: 148). In the port of Santos, the juridical capital of the Federal Police, Customs and Port Guard overlap in activities that lead to finding and seizing cocaine, but disputes arise over competing claims about who deserves credit for these results. For each of these actors, these disputes put at stake reputational aspects regarding recognition of their respective roles and activities, and, thus, affect their symbolic capital. This type of capital is significant in itself, as well as for its possible conversions into equally disputed economic capital, especially between actors who compete for budgets from the same federal government pockets. These dynamics demonstrate that, rather than being accepted by others, the capital claimed by certain actors can be contested and disputed with competing claims.

Abdications

In addition to emerging from claimed capital that is contested or disputed, struggles also emerge from an inverse dynamic. As previous studies have shown, economic, cultural and social capital and other resources are at stake for network members, as are responsibilities. However, ‘[w]hile most organizations were happy to accept the former, some were less interested in the latter part of the package’—so many actors do not try to gain or maintain power but shuffle off or resist responsibilities that do not interest them (Fosher, 2009: 81 and 151). This frustrates private actors who recognize the authoritative role of public actors due to their powers and responsibilities but complain that they do not take their roles seriously (Nøkleberg, 2020). In this regard, instead of being claimed, some forms of capital can be abdicated.

In the port of Santos, the juridical capital of the Federal Police is recognized when other actors call them in because of their powers and responsibilities, but when called, they do not always provide the expected support. The former PFSO Gustavo recounted some situations that exemplify this. In an extreme case, when armed men broke into the terminal to rob an ATM, he complained that the Federal Police and other authorities only arrived on the scene when it was all over: ‘I called in all the institutions, all of you who are here, I called your institutions and nobody came.’ In more common cases, the Federal Police are called in when individuals are seen trying to open containers and engaging in other suspected trafficking activities, but the expectation of support also becomes a complaint when the institution responds with something like ‘keep an eye on them, and I’ll come by later’. Gustavo then told his team: ‘Don’t keep an eye on them. Have you reported it? Then steer clear. They can come by if they want to.’ As noted in previous studies, some public actors seem to expect private actors to ‘be their eyes, ears, hands, and feet’, while the latter expect the former to deal with problems by being ‘competent officials’ (Fosher, 2009: 211–212). As Brewer (2014) notes, responding to calls, and being available and willing to engage with the needs of their partners are trust norms that foster collaborative bonds.

In addition to delayed responses, the Federal Police also fails to meet expectations of support when it shows a lack of interest and denies its responsibility for dealing with certain problems—abdicating ownership of this juridical capital, instead of claiming it. In the view of the former Port Guard João, the Federal and Civil Police take a long time to decide who is responsible for dealing with an incident because ‘when it's not in their interest, one keeps pushing it off onto the other’. In his view, this is clear in cases where the Port Guard finds cocaine: when they do not know that a request for support involves a drug seizure, the Federal Police do not respond with alacrity and even hand the call over to the Civil Police, who investigate local and non-transnational crimes, for example. As João emphasizes, the Federal Police ‘aren’t just there to seize cocaine’. Likewise, the former PFSO Gustavo reported that ‘you called the public agency in and they didn’t come’ when strikes and protests by port workers kept trucks from entering the terminal: ‘often the authorities say “ah, it's blocking your terminal and that's nothing to do with me”’. After many negotiations, according to Gustavo, this disagreement has been resolved, and the Federal Police have ended up recognizing that they are responsible for dealing with the problem, thereby meeting the port terminals’ expectations.

In short, struggles emerge from the dynamics of claims, contestations and disputes, as well as from abdicated capital. When actors give up significant resources, they fail to meet the expectations of others who, by recognizing such capital as belonging to that actor, demand a performance of duties that fulfill the responsibilities that come with the legal powers. These abdications lead to frustrations and put a strain on relationships.