Francesco Ragazzi

Low-tech security: Files, notes, and memos as technologies of anticipation

When it comes to anticipating terrorism, do recent technological advancements fundamentally change the modus operandi of intelligence services? Recent scholarship has focused on the new modes of reasoning brought about by ‘hi-tech’ forms analysis such as data mining, graph visualization and the algorithmic treatment of big data. While this article recognizes the increasing influence of these techniques, it argues they should not overshadow much more low-tech modalities through which a large part of counterterrorism work takes place. Low-tech counter-terrorism, based on qualitative methods and conjectural reasoning, still matters. Drawing on the case of French domestic intelligence services and based on qualitative interviews, observations and declassified documents, this article shows that the practices of security professionals, rooted in traditional institutional habituses developed over time, are largely in continuity with previous ‘low-tech’ forms of police work. In a context in which the uses of digital security technologies have generated discussions about politics and ethics, this article suggests that traditional techniques of intelligence gathering and processing therefore still merit a great amount of attention.

Suspect Community or Suspect Category? The Impact of Counter-Terrorism as ‘Policed Multiculturalism’

ABSTRACT How to think about the impact of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on ethnic and religious accommodation? Much of the literature draws on the concept of ‘suspect community’, suggesting it has primarily alienated the Muslim community, favouring an assimilationist model of ‘muscular liberalism’. In this article, while I consider the merits of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis, I argue that it only partially accounts for the effects of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on multicultural societies. I contend that much of the literature has focused too narrowly on the discriminatory effects of counter-terrorist policies and has been unable to grasp the more insidious political effects of counter-terrorism policies based on the active participation and involvement of Muslims in their own policing. The main hypothesis of this paper is that rather than promoting ‘assimilation’, as the government would expect, or alienation, as the advocates of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis would contend, counter-terrorist policies produce and reinforce a government of society in discrete and divided ethno-religious groups. Such ‘policed multiculturalism’—understood as the recognition and the management of diversity through a security perspective—has an important consequence in that it removes fundamental questions about pluralism from political debate, casting them instead in a depoliticised language of security.

Countering terrorism and radicalisation: Securitising social policy?:

While social and security policies have always overlapped in complex ways, recent developments in counter-terrorism policy suggest that Western European states, and the United Kingdom more specifically, are accelerating what can be termed the ‘securitisation of social policy’1 – namely, the increased submission of social policy actors and their practices to the logics of security and social control. With the PREVENT programme remaining highly controversial, what are the effects of these state practices? Has David Cameron’s project of ‘muscular liberalism’, aimed at integration and community cohesion, been enforced through counter-radicalisation policies? This themed issue examines preventative counter-terrorism policies in the UK and the politics of religion, ethnicity and race they enact. The relation between social policy and critical security studies is explored by an interdisciplinary group of scholars.

National Programmes for Mass Surveillance of Personal Data in EU Member States and their Compatibility with EU Law

In the wake of the disclosures surrounding PRISM and other US surveillance programmes, this study makes an assessment of the large-scale surveillance practices by a selection of EU member states: the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Given the large-scale nature of surveillance practices at stake, which represent a reconfiguration of traditional intelligence gathering, the study contends that an analysis of European surveillance programmes cannot be reduced to a question of balance between data protection versus national security, but has to be framed in terms of collective freedoms and democracy. It finds that four of the five EU member states selected for in-depth examination are engaging in some form of large-scale interception and surveillance of communication data, and identifies parallels and discrepancies between these programmes and the NSA-run operations. The study argues that these surveillance programmes do not stand outside the realm of EU intervention but can be engaged from an EU law perspective via (i) an understanding of national security in a democratic rule of law framework where fundamental human rights standards and judicial oversight constitute key standards; (ii) the risks presented to the internal security of the Union as a whole as well as the privacy of EU citizens as data owners, and (iii) the potential spillover into the activities and responsibilities of EU agencies. The study then presents a set of policy recommendations to the European Parliament.

Europe, Knowledge, Politics — Engaging with the Limits: The c.a.s.e. collective Responds

HAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’, the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitizationHAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’,1 the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitization. If, in this sense, the article can be read as a manifesto (with, we should note, the important prefix ‘networked’), we did not assert, as Andreas Behnke Rejoinder

Review of Security Measures in the 7th Research Framework Programme FP7 2007-2013

Upon request by the LIBE Committee, this study analyses how the public-private dialogue has been framed and shaped and examines the priorities set up in calls and projects that have received funding from the European Commission under the security theme of the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7 20072013). In particular, this study addresses two main questions: to what extent is security research placed at the service of citizens? To what extent does it contribute to the development of a single area of fundamental rights and freedoms? The study finds that security research has only partly addressed the concerns of EU citizens and that security research has been mainly put at the service of industry rather than society.

The Paris attacks: magical thinking & hijacking trust

The recent attacks in Paris have highlighted three key issues which face Europe. The most obvious one, of course, is the issue of political violence. Although the official figures that national governments provide each year to Europol do not disclose the number of attacks, convictions, or acquittals which could be categorized as ‘religiously inspired,’ this matters very little (Europol 2015). Following the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher killings in January 2015, the mass shootings at the Stade de France and Bataclan in November last year, and the fact that 5000 Europeans are estimated to be fighting in Syria (The Guardian; 8 December 2015), the general feeling is one of an overwhelming and growing threat. The public is scared, and they are looking for solutions from their government (The New York Times; 23 November 2015). The second major concern is that diasporic Muslim communities across Europe are increasingly feeling insecure as a result of targeted hatred and discrimination. They feel excluded not only by right-wing extremist movements, but also by mainstream institutions of society such as the media, schools, and the police (The Independent; 16 November 2015), institutions that are supposed to guarantee their security, safety, and well-being. The third issue is that government responses currently deployed in France – as well as in most European countries – are based on at least two forms of magical thinking which are, at best, unlikely to solve the first issue, but are quite certain to make the second worse. Since the mid-2000s, governments across Europe have deployed several measures to counter-radicalization and terrorism. While there is not much space to describe them here in detail, they all revolve around a combination of ‘hard measures’ based on surveillance and coercion, as well as a set of supposedly ‘softer’ measures aimed at detecting and treating ‘radicals’ with the help of professionals, religious representatives, and civil society organizations, engaging in dialogue and producing counter-narratives to violent ideologies (Thomas 2012). While the ‘hard’ measures can be efficient when targeted and respectful of the rule of law, the ‘softer measures,’ as they are currently deployed by European governments, are by and large both flawed and dangerous. They are based on two forms of magical thinking (Heath-Kelly 2012a). The first is the idea that we can track or recognize a process of radicalization; that there are ‘potential’ radicals and that with the right tools and the right criteria we could anticipate the making of future terrorists (Kundnani 2012). Although most state agencies recognize that radicalization is not a simple or linear process, all of them state that certain elements allow us to anticipate it. This assumption suggests that not only the police, but also the entire civil society – teachers, university professors, prison guards, social workers, and imams – should participate in the detection and identification of future radicals. However, John Horgan (2009), who tracked the trajectory of dozens of former

Frontiers of fear – immigration and insecurity in the United States and Europe

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