Assessing European futures in an age of reflexive security

Abstract

Over the past decade, European assessments of organised crime have evolved into strategic future-oriented intelligence systems. Policy-makers want to be informed about coming organised crime threats and challenges. We use the concepts of reflexive government and reflexive security to explore this shift in EU policing, and suggest that strategic planning in the field of organised crime control might benefit from the use of scenario methodologies. We focus on the assumptions that underpin scenario exercises and we outline how they might be developed.

Keywords:

• organised crime
• reflexive security
• scenario methodologies

Notes

1. It was Popper (1957/2002, p. 149) who most famously argued against the notion that change (future) can be foreseen because it is ruled by an unchanging law. According to Popper, historicism, or the idea that evolution is underpinned by laws and is determined, is founded upon a misunderstanding of the methods of physics. Historical prediction, which would have to be attained by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history, can and should not be the aimof the social sciences (see also: Luhmann, 1998).

2. In addition to this scientific debate, long-term strategic planners might furthermore be confronted with the difficulty of changing sensibilities and significance of criminal behavior (e.g. processes of (de)criminalization) for law enforcement and society (see also von Lampe 2005).

3. We will however not adopt Beck's analysis about reflexive modernization but ground our argument in the governmentality literature on reflexive government (Dean 1999) and the uptake or account of Beck's work in reflexive security studies.