Actors and Sites for Knowledge Production on Radicalisation in Europe and Beyond

ABSTRACT

This article aims at reviewing and mapping the actors and sites involved in knowledge production on radicalisation, focusing on the EU context. We did so by collecting information on EU-funded research projects, which cover subjects of radicalisation and violent extremism, and are sponsored through either the Seventh Framework Programme or Horizon 2020; and analysing them from the point of view of the actors involved in the project implementation. Complementarily, we have focused on the actors involved in the design of the calls for project proposals and the strategic documents framing and embedding them. By premising on the assumption that experts’ knowledge and scientific knowledge are sources of leverage and contention in security-related policy areas, we intend to have a well-rounded grasp of the actors that are involved in the production and utilisation of such knowledge in policy-making, their organisation, their gate-keeping capacity and the instruments at their disposal.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge production
• radicalisation
• European Union
• security research

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments they provided during the review process. Earlier versions of this article were presented in the framework of workshops and conferences organised by, respectively, SOURCE - Societal Security Network and EUCTER - Jean Monnet Network on EU Counter-Terrorism. We thus thank the organisers and participants of those events too for letting us share our interim insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Haas has defined an epistemic community as ‘a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue area.’ (1992, 3) Members of an epistemic community share four properties: principled beliefs about the right course of social and political action; causal beliefs about social and political phenomena; notions of validity about accepted and neutral knowledge; a common policy enterprise (Cross Davis 2013).

2. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/counter-terrorism/funding-research-projects-radicalisation_en, (last accessed 24 January 2021).

3. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/networks/radicalisation_awareness_network_en, (last accessed 14 February 2021).

4. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/counter-terrorism/radicalisation_en, (last accessed on 14 February 2021).

5. That Decision paved the way to the EU’s participation not only to the Hedayah Centre but also to the Valletta-based International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law and the Geneva-based Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund.

6. https://www.hedayahcenter.org/resources/interactive_cve_apps/annual-international-cve-research-conference/ (last accessed 24 February 2021).

7. Counter-radicalisation initiatives are also being funded within the funding programmes of EU’s DG for Neighbourhood and Enlargement (DG NEAR), the European Audio-visual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) and the DG for International Cooperation and Development (DEVCO).

8. http://www.eos-eu.com/, (last accessed 25 February 2021).

9. According to Jeandesboz (2015), promiscuity in the study of the EU security refers to two aspects of the research process: on the one hand, scholars interact with security actors for research purposes through site-intensive techniques of inquiry. On the other, security practitioners are increasingly involved in research endeavours fostered by EU funding of security research: those studying EU security politics more and more frequently share venues of dissemination and research activities with officials from the EU security agencies, from national security bodies or private sector experts. The financial resources committed by the EU bodies to security research also translate into calls for applied research or expertise, to the advantage of problem-solving knowledge while cornering critical work (in the Coxian sense).