Organisational Fad and Coordination Failure: The GTAZ and Anis Amri

In the aftermath of 9/11, the German federal government established the Joint Centre for Counterterrorism (GTAZ, Gemeinsames Terrorabwehrzentrum) to improve coordination among security and intelligence agencies from both federal and state level. The GTAZ is not an agency of its own but serves as a platform, to which the relevant agencies delegate experts that meet regularly and are organized in working groups around a number of topics. This organizational model, unknown to the German administrative architecture before, rapidly came into fashion as it spread in the German security sector. Following subsequent coordination failures, such as in the case of the nazi-terror group that committed a series of murders across Germany but was undetected for about a decade (NSU, Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund), further joint centres were established. Today, four other joint centres do exist next to the GTAZ: one on internet, one on cybersecurity, one on extremism and terror and one on illegal migration, each of which involves the respective federal and state level police and intelligence agencies. While fashionable and supposed to be the timely, up to date solution to improve coordination in the security sector, it is unclear if those joint centres deliver, i.e., improve coordination. The case of Anis Amri, the terrorist who attacked the Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016, provides good reason to be skeptical about the potential of the platforms to address coordination problems: As suspected of preparing a terror attack in Germany, he was an item discussed on the GTAZagenda on several occasions prior to the attack, but no action was subsequently take. Through an in-depth analysis of this case, this paper studies the effects of the platform organization on inter-agency coordination in the German security centre. The paper argues that rather than changing actual coordination practices, the platforms create arenas for formal compliance, i.e., members talk, but no action follows. The paper hypothesizes that this formal compliance results from the establishment of the platform as a fashionable organizational structure created to accommodate political demands, but not altering institutionalized bureaucratic behavior. Hence, temporality is here studied as the spread and implication of an organizational fashion. The paper is based on document analysis and interviews.