CHALLENGE
The Changing Landscape of
European Liberty and Security
Integrated Project – Sixth Framework Research
Programme, DG Research, European
Commission
Summary

CHALLENGE 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 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 of
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.
In particular the project seeks:
 to understand the merging between internal and external
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 security over time in some especially
sensitive sites; 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, who have already played a
formative role in re-conceptualizing and analyzing many of the
theoretical, political, sociological, legal and policy
implications of new forms of violence and political identity;
and

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. This consortium will be open to including
further participants during the lifetime of the project; and

To this end the project will create an Interdisciplinary
OBSERVATORY charged with the analysis and evaluation of
the changing relationship between security, stability and
liberty in an enlarging EU.
CHALLENGE Consortium

CHALLENGE is composed by 21 universities and research
institutes all around the EU:Among others:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, King's
College London, London School of Economics and Political
Science, University of Nijmegen (Centre for Migration Law),
National Capodistrian University of Athens, Groupe de
Sociologie des Religions et de la Laïcite (GSRL), Stefan
Batory Foundation, etc.
Principal Approach and
Implementation

The project will be organized around four sorts of questions
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 and disaggregation of borders implies a rearticulation, 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 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, etc) in the general areas of
sociology, law, criminology, security, civil society, religion,
citizenship and human rights. The rich diversity of
interdisciplinary perspectives is likely to push these resources
out of their more familiar settings in a way we judge to be
appropriate for emerging policy challenges.

Finally, it will enhance an emerging cross-cultural and
cross-national conversation about 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.