Extant theories of transnational policing consider police activities without accounting for the relation between the police and the state, and, in turn, for the role of the state as an indispensable building block of global capitalism. These problems are fully grasped by the concept of the global imperialist chain, which is informed by the materialist problematic of capital, labour and the state as a field condensing a particular balance of social forces. However, its application necessitates a reworking of concepts pertaining to the modalities by which social formations are articulated within the imperialist chain (hegemony, overdetermination), and secondly, to the role of the police as the state apparatus that practically regulates citizenship within social formation. I apply this theoretical vocabulary to explain the conditions that engendered the Mirage regional transnational policing operations in southeast Europe between 2002 and 2004. The operations targetting sex trafficking and irregular migration as instances of organised crime were organised by the SECI regional police cooperation centre, Bucharest, and involved the police forces of 12 Balkan countries. I examine the global prohibition regime on trafficking, the organisation of SECI, and the conduct of these operations by the Hellenic police, as entry points towards the understanding of Mirage. The event was overdetermined by the process of the re-articulation of post-communist Southeast Europe’s position within the global imperialist chain, which made possible the materialisation of structurally determined and contradictory relations between social forces in struggle into particular organisational forms and pertinent actions of these different national police bureaucracies. Results suggest the dynamics of transnational policing are nowhere as linear and inevitable as extant approaches claim, but rather reversible and contingent upon the contradictory class practices condensed in the state.