Cooperation and Conflict

The central contention of this article holds that scholars do not adequately assess and explain the influence of transboundary security issues on government behaviour. Their assessment is not adequate because they do not fully conceptualize the relationship between internal and external security concerns. Their explanations are not adequate because existing theories cannot fully explain how and why states respond to transboundary security issues. To rectify these concerns, stimulate and structure further research, and encourage scholarly dialogue, we build an analytical framework for (a) understanding what we describe as the ‘nexus’ of internal and external security matters, and (b) explaining why that nexus may change state behaviour on transboundary security issues. The resulting framework encourages a strong focus on the nature of transboundary problems before studying their implications for changes in perceptions, policies, politics and polity.

In this article, we argue that the premature abolishment of the allegedly anachronistic concepts of internal versus external security is of doubtful heuristic value for the study of security practices. The two domains may gradually converge from the perspective of problems, but do so much less in terms of political practices. We show that security policy is pursued according to different systems of rules. It follows distinct institutional logics. We undertake a systematic comparison of policy-making in the European Union’s Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) and Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). It is structured along the distinction between making and implementing an agreement as indicative stages of the policy-making process. First, rule-setting asks how decisions are made in the two domains: with or without the inclusion of external actors. Second, we explore whether the implementation of political decisions involves management or enforcement mechanisms. The empirical results are unambiguous: the political actors follow different systems of rules in the two domains. There are still ‘ideal-typical’ differences in a Weberian sense. This implies that internal and external security may be closely linked, like the opposite sides of the same coin, but must be separated for the purpose of analytical clarity.

The development of European Union (EU) civil protection cooperation highlights important issues in the debate on the internal—external security nexus. It points to the increased transnationalization of threats usually assigned to the field of ‘internal’ security, but it also presents researchers with a puzzle: despite the relatively rapid development of civil protection cooperation, there is still substantial disagreement among the EU member states as to how it should continue to develop. Applying an analytical framework based on neo-institutional organization theory and the study of organizational ‘fields’, this article explores two questions: What is the institutional basis for member states’ diverging positions on the future direction of EU civil protection? and How may these positions affect the current development of EU civil protection? Our analysis draws upon empirical evidence from civil protection practice in Spain, Sweden and the EU, including official documents in the form of bills and laws, policy papers and elite interviews. We find that the basis for member states’ diverging positions on the future of EU civil protection is rooted in conflicting national institutional logics of civil protection. No logic has become dominant at the EU level, suggesting that as long as multiple institutional logics continue to coexist, disagreement on the future development of European level civil protection cooperation will persist.

In this article, I explore the relationship between ‘value’ and ‘security’ in the conceptualization of European construction and its transformation in recent years through the anti-terror effort. I suggest that the landscape of human values, and the way it is correlated with security, is discontinuous and fragmented. In the post-Madrid/London era, variations in cultures of law enforcement, border control, intelligence and diplomacy, and, not least, new cultures of fear and prudence, render this landscape increasingly complex. The value-laden nature of security and insecurity has contributed to a fragmented evolution in European approaches to the challenge of security. The politics of harmonization and standardization of European security reveals not a singularity in security, but the contrary, namely multiple securities. I thus develop a counter-argument to both realist and social constructivist understandings of values and the role these play in security thinking. I affirm, in a typical constructivist vein, that values matter in the formation of security policy. However, I reverse the typical constructivist position that sees security as the embodiment of ideas, arguing instead that the European self-understanding is itself the product of its own constellation of security and insecurity.

British Muslims are citizens of the United Kingdom and also part of a worldwide community, the Umma, the Muslim community of the faithful. British Muslims have both national and transnational allegiances and on the part of the British state this has necessitated new ways of governing its Muslim citizens. Concerns over both terrorist violence and societal security questions regarding Muslims in the UK are both internal and external to the state. The government has had difficulties in finding transnational policy responses that go beyond the old division of internal and external security. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, security was the main reason why the British state sought to engage Muslims, but this has been transformed into the wider agenda of ‘community cohesion’. In tracing the Muslim groups that the government has engaged with since 2001, I show how the issue of governing Muslims has gone beyond concerns just about terrorism and violence to a wider agenda that accepts British Muslims as citizens, yet at the same time still reflects the fears of Muslim ‘otherness’. I consider how this otherness is seen as a threat to societal security, and how the government’s attempt to create policies to deal with such threats is best understood as the ‘politics of unease’.