Ethical Security in Europe? Empirical Findings on Value Shifts and Dilemmas Across European Internal-External Security Policies (original) (raw)
Putting critique to work: Ethics in EU security research
Security Dialogue, 2019
In this article, we examine the possibility of exercising critique through the mandatory ethical coverage that EU security research projects must be subjected to. Applied ethics, so we argue, speaks to several core issues in the critical security studies agenda, such as turning abstract considerations of critique into forms of tangible cooperation, engaging exoteric communities, and placing normative questions about security within concrete contexts of its imagination and production. Accordingly, it can be seen as a concrete way of putting critique to work. At the same time, however, applied ethics does face considerable challenges that result from its location in the middle of numerous cross-pressures, such as political ambitions, economic interests, technological rationales and the demands of security professionals. These challenges risk turning what was intended to be the critical corrective of applied ethics into a legitimizing function of mere 'ethics approval'. Drawing on personal experiences as well as debates on critical security studies and ethics, we discuss some of these challenges and discuss the possibility of and conditions for critique within the arena of EU security research.
This book examines how internal and external security are blurring at the EU level, and the implications this has for EU security governance and the EU as a security actor. The EU claims that 'internal and external security are inseparable' and requires a more integrated approach. This book critically assesses this claim in relation to the threats facing the EU, its responses to them, and the practical and normative implications for EU security governance and actorness. It sets out a novel conceptual framework-the EU security continuum-to examine the ways and extent to which internal and external security are blurring along three axes: geographic, bureaucratic, and functional. This is done through an analysis of four key security issues: regional conflict, terrorism, organised crime, and cybersecurity. The book demonstrates that, to varying degrees, these security threats and/or responses do transcend boundaries. However, institutional turf wars and capability silos hamper the EU's Integrated Approach and, therefore, its management of transboundary security threats. Yet, the EU's pursuit of an integrated approach is reframing its claimed normative distinctiveness towards a more practical one, based on a transnational and multidimensional approach. Such a rearticulation, if implemented, would make the EU a genuinely transboundary security actor, properly structured and equipped to tackle the 21st century's internal-external security continuum. This book will be of much interest to students of European Security, EU politics, and international relations.
2010
The aim of this work is to provide informed insights about the main understandings on security governance. ‘Security governance’ as a concept is investigated, and the theoretical assumptions upon which or against which the term is built presented. Security governance literature lacks of a reflection upon the understanding and construction of ‘security’; instead, attempts at bridging the literature on security with that on security governance may enhance the theoretical and empirical relevance of the term. The analysis of the European system of security governance will emphasise how the post-Westphalian nature of states within Europe renders security regulation efforts different from those of other systems. Against this background, prospect of cooperation do not only depend on the possible exportation of the European system of security governance, but also on compatible interests among different actors and on European reliability as a security actor in cooperative efforts.
New Challenges for the EU Internal Security Strategy
"In the past number of years, the EU and its member states have experienced a number of changes, as well as challenges, in the areas of politics, economics, security and law. As these areas are interconnected, changes and challenges to or in any of them have implications for the others, as well as implications for the populations and institutions of the EU or those coming into contact with its international power and influence. This edited collection will focus primarily on security and law, and most notably the EU’s internal security strategy. The EU’s Internal Security Strategy, adopted by the Spanish presidency early in 2010, followed on from the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, building on previous developments within the EU in the Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ) policy. The focus of the EU Internal Security Strategy is to prevent and combat “serious and organised crime, terrorism and cybercrime, in strengthening the management of our external borders and in building resilience to national and man-made disasters”. The Internal Security strategy intersects and overlaps with the European Union’s Counter-terrorism strategy, the Strategy for the External Dimension of JHA, and the EU’s Security Strategy. The role of and interaction between these strategies, their supplementing documents, and their implications for crime, victims, the law, political relations, democracy and human rights, form the backdrop against which the chapters in this collection are written. Building on original research by its contributors, this collection comprises work by authors from a wide variety of academic and professional areas and perspectives, as well as different countries, on a variety of areas and issues related to or raised by the EU’s Internal Security Strategy, from intelligence-led policing to human trafficking and port security. This book examines, from a wide variety of discipline perspective, to include law, geography, politics and practice, both this further refinement of existing internal provisions on cross border crime, and the increasing external relations of the EU in the AFSJ. The collection is divided into five parts. The first part will examine the fundamental relationship between policing and security. Part two will examine the relationship between security and location. While a great deal of attention has been focused on airports and passenger air travel since 9/11, in part two we have decided to concentrate on another specific but less examined location, EU commercial maritime ports. The third and fourth parts of this collection focus on two particular types of crime as case studies, commercial/financial crime and human trafficking. The fifth and final part of the book examines the “bigger picture”, the relationship between the EU’s internal and external security policy. Within each part, the contributors examine different, but overlapping, legal, political, practical and analytical cases, themes and issues. Dr. Maria O’Neill, Law Division, University of Abertay Dundee, UK. Maria is an EU lawyer, who specialises in the EU’s provisions on Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters. She is the coordinator of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies collaborative research network on “Policing and European Studies”. She has a number of publications in this area, to include a recent book on The Evolving EU Counter-Terrorism Legal Framework, with Routledge. Ken Swinton, Law Division, University of Abertay Dundee, UK. Ken is a Scottish qualified solicitor, legal academic, and editor of a number of Scottish based law publications, to include the Scottish Law Gazette. He specialises in Financial Services law. Dr. Aaron Winter is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Abertay. He holds a DPhil in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex. His research examines racism, the extreme-right, terrorism and political violence. He is co-editor of and a contributor to Discourses and Practices of Terrorism: Interrogating Terror (Routledge, 2010) and the author of White Separatism and the Politics of the American Extreme-Right: Civil Rights, 9/11 and a Black Man in the White House (Ashgate, forthcoming)."