CHALLENGE The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security

CHALLENGE is an Integrated Project - Sixth Framework Research Programme Theme 6.1.1 of Priority 7, «Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge based society),DG Research, European Commission - objective driven research

The project seeks to facilitate more responsive and responsible judgments about new regimes and practices of security in order to minimize the degree to which they may undermine civil liberties, human rights and social cohesion. It especially seeks to do so in the context of the new evolving international environment shaped by events: 11th September 2001, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq and the 11th March 2004 in Madrid.

The aim is to help reframe the security framework emerging in Europe to ensure that it starts with liberty (civil liberties, human rights and social cohesion) as its point of departure.

In particular the project seeks:

to understand the merging between internal (Justice and Home Affairs) and external (CFSP) security and evaluate the changing character of the relationship between liberty and security in Europe;

to facilitate the assessment of the changing relationship between liberty and securityover time; to look at the different institutions in charge of security and at their current transformations;

to facilitate and enhance a new interdisciplinary network of scholars across many regions of Europe, and from many interdisciplinary disciplines;

to bring together the new interdisciplinary network of scholars into an Integrated Project focusing on the State of exception as illiberal practice and illiberal regimes and the tensions between security and civil liberties with the same tools and methodology; and

to create an Interdisciplinary OBSERVATORY charged with the analysis and evaluation of the changing relationship between security, stability and liberty in an enlarging EU

Principal Approach and Implementation

The project is organized around four sorts of questions (each several WPs) which are central to the evolving security dynamic and its relationship with liberty in Europe:

1. CONCEPTUAL:An historical analysis of the institutionalization of exceptionalism as a practice of modern states; an examination of the ways in which the contemporary re-articulation of borders implies a re-articulation, de-territorialization and dispersal of practices of exceptionalism; an analysis of the changing relation between new forms of war and defense, new procedures for policing and governance, and new threats to civil liberties and social cohesion.

2. EMPIRICAL:

-The Observatory: mapping the merging between internal and external security and their transnational relation with regard to national political life;

-Sociology/Economy: analyzing new vulnerabilities (targeted others, critical infrastructures) and social in-cohesion (such as the perception of other religious groups, etc)

3. GOVERNANCE/POLITY/LEGAL:

-The dangers to liberty under conditions of violence when the state no longer has the last word on the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

-The danger that «technical responses» reproduce the old habit of seeking greater control in the name of exceptional circumstances.

-Questions about the changing relation between violence and risk, how violence works today if the old interstate wars are no longer understood to be the paradigmatic form of violence and the effects of new patterns of liberty and security, or their absence, on the contemporary political imagination.

4. POLICY:

-an examination of the implications of the dispersal of exceptionalism for the changing relationship between: government departments concerned with Security, Justice and Home Affairs; the securing of state borders and the policing of foreign interventions; etc.

CHALLENGE aims to run over a period of 5 years and will be implemented in 5 phases. It consists of 17 workpackages, which include 15 substantive workpackages to implement the above approach addressing both macro and more micro aspects of the issues at hand in the context of an enlarged Europe, 2 co-ordination packages (scientific and administrative management) and the observatory as WP17.

Expected Benefits

This project is expected to bring benefits in four main areas:

First, it will result in the development of a significant institution, the Observatory, specifically charged with making informed analyses of developing patterns of exceptionalism at the boundary between practices of liberty and practices of security in European public life. This in turn will be policy relevant and produce a database from which more sustainable research can proceed into core public policy dilemmas based on intellectually rigorous scientific research of an applied nature - benefits at conceptual, substantial and policy-relevant levels

Second, it will enable the development of an innovative interdisciplinary network of scholars who have been influential in placing questions about the changing relationship between liberty and security on both intellectual and policy agendas not only in Europe but also in North America and elsewhere.

Third, it will generate a broad array of research resources (databases, website, expertise, observatory, reports, books, classified bibliography, workshops, conferences, etc) in the general areas of sociology, law, criminology, security, civil society, religion, citizenship and human rights.

Finally, it will enhance an emerging cross-cultural and cross-national conversationabout fundamental questions concerning the way new relations between the norms of civil society and the exceptionalisms generated by a broad range of contemporary risks and dangers are rescripting the possibilities of a liberal democratic politics in many different settings.

Sergio Carrera

Research Fellow

Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)

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The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security