The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security

Contemporary discussions on the merging between internal and external security and the relationship between liberty and security in Europe are seriously constrained by the degree to which the concepts, historical practices and institutions of liberty and security have been examined independently. This analytical division of labour expresses the practical and institutional division of labour encouraged by the structures of the modern international system and its distinction between foreign and domestic policies. This project is informed by an appreciation of the historical circumstances under which this distinction became a crucial defining feature of political life in the modern world of sovereign states, and of its consequences for the forms of liberal democratic politics that have emerged in Europe over the past few centuries. More significantly, it is also informed by an analysis of a broad range of structural changes on a global scale that now pose many profound challenges to this defining feature of modern European politics. Conversely, and more crucially for this project, the familiar world of secured communities living within well-defined territories and sustaining all the celebrated liberties of civil society is now seriously in tension with a profound restructuring of political identities and practices of securitization.

This project, consisting of 16 Workpackages and grouped in 5 phases, seeks to facilitate more responsive and responsible judgements about new regimes and practices of security in order to minimize the degree to which they undermine civil liberties, human rights and social cohesion in an enlarging Europe. It especially seeks to do so in the context of the new evolving international environment shaped by the events of September 11, 2001 and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 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. To this end the project will create an Interdisciplinary Observatory (under the direction of the project’s scientific co-ordinator) charged with the analysis and evaluation of the changing relationship between sustainable security, stability and liberty in an enlarging EU which upholds the values of democracy. The projects aims:

 to understand the merging between internal and external security and evaluate the changing character of the relationship between liberty and security in Europe, especially as it expresses a transformation in the sovereign capacity to declare exceptions

 to facilitate the assessment of the changing relationship between liberty and security over time in some especially sensitive sites; to look at the different institutions in charge of security (police, intelligence services, military forces and private

 to facilitate and enhance a new interdisciplinary network of scholars ( anumber of whom already collaborate in the framework of the FP5 ELISE project financed by DG Research) across many regions of Europe and from many scholarly disciplines, who have already played a formative role in reconceptualizing and analysing many of the theoretical, political, sociological, legal and policy implications of new forms of violence and political identity;

 to bring together the new interdisciplinary network of scholars into an Integrated project focusing on the State of exeption as illiberal practice and illiberal regimes with the same tools and methodology. This consortium will

BE open to including further participants during the lifetime of the project.