The European Union (EU) has modest but promising capacities to assist member states overwhelmed by disaster through its Civil Protection Mechanism. The EU also routinely sends civil and military missions to hotspots outside EU territory. But these capacities do not suffice in the face of transboundary crises: threats that cross geographical and policy borders within the Union. Examples include epidemics, financial crises, floods, and cyber terrorism. Nation states cannot cope with these threats without international collaboration. In this article, we explore the EU's efforts to develop transboundary crisis management capacities. We describe these budding capacities, explain their policy origins, and explore their future potential.
The world of crises and disasters is changing rapidly. We are witnessing new types of adversity. In addition, modern societies have become increasingly vulnerable to disruptions, new and old. This new world demands new types of responses, which nation states cannot produce alone. Nation states will have to cooperate to protect their citizens from these threats. This article investigates the role of the European Union in the development of new safety and security arrangements. It identifies conceptual building blocks for a new security paradigm and offers design principles that can facilitate a shared way of thinking and acting in the safety and security domain
The COVID‐19 crisis is a stark reminder that modern society is vulnerable to a special species of trouble: the creeping crisis. The creeping crisis poses a deep challenge to both academics and practitioners. In the crisis literature, it remains ill‐defined and understudied. It is even harder to manage. As a threat, it carries a potential for societal disruption—but that potential is not fully understood. An accumulation of these creeping crises can erode public trust in institutions. This paper proposes a definition of a creeping crisis, formulates research questions, and identifies the most relevant theoretical approaches. It provides the building blocks for the systematic study of creeping crises.
The notion of a creeping crisis is a conceptual one, a heuristic device useful for helping to uncover hidden dimensions of today’s more pressing—some might say existential—societal problems. In this introductory chapter, we present our definition of creeping crisis and unpack the analytical dimensions of the concept. We review what existing research does and does not tell us about those dimensions. The chapter concludes by highlighting key research questions and outlining how the case studies in the book help to answer those questions.
This chapter returns to the research question that animated the case studies and summarizes the findings of the chapters in this book. It offers provisional answers to our research question and formulates an agenda for future research. Much of the chapter is devoted to thinking through the implications of the creeping crisis perspective for the practitioner community. We build on our research findings to argue that the time for action is now and formulate a set of recommendations that can help jumpstart this agenda.
This open access book explores a special species of trouble afflicting modern societies: creeping crises. These crises evolve over time, reveal themselves in different ways, and resist comprehensive responses despite periodic public attention. As a result, these crises continue to creep in front of our eyes. This book begins by defining the concept of a creeping crisis, showing how existing literature fails to properly define and explore this phenomenon and outlining the challenges such crises pose to practitioners. Drawing on ongoing research, this book presents a diverse set of case studies on: antimicrobial resistance, climate change-induced migration, energy extraction, big data, Covid-19, migration, foreign fighters, and cyberattacks. Each chapter explores how creeping crises come into existence, why they can develop unimpeded, and the consequences they bring in terms of damage and legitimacy loss. The book provides a proof-of-concept to help launch the systematic study of creeping crises. Our analysis helps academics understand a new species of threat and practitioners recognize and prepare for creeping crises.
One key question for the European security community is whether today’s confrontation between the EU member states and Russia is the end of its spread to the Baltic Sea region, including Russian districts, and the beginning of a return of geopolitical rivalry in the region. This article investigates the possibilities of avoiding such a negative downward spiral by drawing on security community theory and discussing two different methods of security community building – “top-down” and “bottom-up”. It points to the need for the EU institutions to return to the Monnet method to find a way out of the geopolitical “zero-sum” game increasingly played by the governments in the region. This implies not putting restrictions on participants from the north-west regions of Russia in strategically chosen areas of cooperation, and a more pronounced bottom-up, long-term and macro-regional approach built on joint problem-solving projects and people-topeople contacts that generate “win-win” games.
This article attempts to explain why governments are surprised when extreme weather, pandemics and migration crisis hit their own country despite their good knowledge of these global threats. With the help of the contingency concept, the article explores the reasons behind these surprises by introducing a new category of threats that complements the ones in the existing literature on surprise. It adds the concept of ‘known—corporally unknown’ threats to the list of known-unknowns, unknown-unknowns as a way to emphasize the difference between abstract knowledge of ‘facts and figures’ (of e.g., global warming) and the acquiring of knowledge through personal, bodily experience (tangere) (of flooding and draughts). The article demonstrates how Swedish decision-makers—despite their good scientific knowledge and warning signals from abroad—were surprised by the migration crisis of 2015 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 because they had not been in direct touch with massive flows of refugees or pandemics of that scale before. The article ends by discussing new ways of acquiring knowledge about global threats for a deeper, corporally anchored, preparedness for the surprises and contingencies to come.
European states may no longer expect inter‐state violence, but they do expect complex threats emanating from storms, epidemics, terror attacks and earthquakes. The EU has answered these threats through the rapid and far‐reaching institutionalization of European security cooperation. However, member states hesitate to use their common capacities. While both intergovernmental and constructivist approaches treat this pattern as evidence of weak integration and as unimportant to the European security community, we examine this cooperation through the lens of practice theory and reveal how the growth of EU capacities is fully compatible with a critical and cautious approach to activating these resources in the everyday work of national officials. Using unique empirical data retrieved through participant observation in the first multisectoral crisis management exercise held by the EU, the findings of this analysis sketch the contours of a new type of security community.
Why did the Swedish Government fail to act earlier against the Covid-19-virus in the light of the many foreshadowing outbreaks in China and in Italy and other EU Member States? With the help of the concept creeping crisis (smygande kris), this article analyses the tardiness with which the Swedish authorities acted to prevent the spread of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic (January – February 2020). The term refers to the phenomenon of belated measures despite extensive knowledge of slow-acting threats with sudden outbursts such as pandemics and global warming. The article explains the procrastination of Swedish actions as a result of psychological repression (“it couldn’t happen here in our country”), as well as cognitive delays that meant that understanding the threat evolution in the abstract did not spur action in proportion to the insight (“we saw it coming, but didn’t act until we felt it in our everyday life”). It ends by discussing possible ways to create more practically and temporally informed knowledge (“know-how”, “know-when”) of creeping crises for the generation of timely action able to stop these before they explode into acute crises.
Security Sector Reform (SSR) is increasingly becoming a cornerstone in international security and development cooperation. Indeed, the concept has often been seen as a panacea for many of the biggest threats to the world such as failed states, terrorism and poverty. In particular, this book focuses on the complexities of implementation of SSR across the globe and the actual and potential role for the European Union (EU) to play in SSR. As suggested in the title of the book, this involves not only opportunities, but challenges to be overcome as well. There are three core themes to this book: Policy, Policies and Practice. By presenting the themes in this particular order, a greater appreciation of the influences on the process of SSR, from conception to implementation, is relayed to the reader. This volume appeals to audiences interested in the EU as a global actor and the interrelationships between foreign, security, defence and development policies.
The Norwegian state has a long-standing tradition of protecting its citizens from a range of threats from natural disasters, infectious diseases, industrial accidents, critical infrastructure failure, to terrorist attacks. This case study provides a broad and detailed description on the main features of the modern Norwegian civil security system. It explains how it functions, it describes the system’s political and cultural context, and it addresses the changes that have occurred since the Oslo bombing and the Utøya shootings in 2011 July 22. The coordination of human and material resources to prevent, prepare, respond to, and recover from, various crises is constructed along three guiding principles of responsibility, decentralization, and conformity. This not only means that responsibility for crisis management should be at the lowest possible level, but that the state and its society must also operate under normal standards, regardless of the type or extent of a particular crisis. As this study shows, most areas of the civil security system are infused with these defining principles. This can be seen, for example, in the discussion on the cultural elements that inform Norwegian society, the production of legislation, or in operational procedures used in responding to crises. In addition to these areas, this study also provides detailed descriptions on Norway’s administrative and legal traditions, its external cooperative endeavours, as well as the way in which the private sector and citizens interact with civil security system. In order to further understand the system, this study investigates three quality measures based on the extent to which the system is effective, efficient, and legitimate. An annex is also included that depicts the principal descriptive features of the study, as well as a case study on the H1N1 virus. Set within the dark shadows of the events that took place on July 22 – that could have been avoided through existing security measures according to Norwegian state authorities – this study concludes by highlighting the need for an increase in vigilance and efficiency of the Norwegian civil security system.
This case study provides a comprehensive description of cooperation in the Barents Euro Arctic Region (BEAR). Regional cooperation in this area includes two inter-related organizations. The first is the Barents Euro-Arctic Regional Council (BEAC), which is as an intergovernmental forum that consists of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Russian Federation. The second is the Barents Regional Council (BRC), which is an interregional forum that consists of 13 counties or provinces from northern Norway, Sweden and Finland and northwestern Russia. In the last 20 years this unique institutional framework has expanded to include cooperation not only on economic and social development, but also in the area of civil security. Building on and complementing existing cooperative endeavours in the field – such as cooperation in maritime and aeronautical search and rescue, existing bilateral agreements on emergency cooperation, and the 1986 Convention on Assistance in Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency – the members of the BEAC and the BRC institutionalized emergency management cooperation in 2008. This includes inter alia notification of emergencies, the establishment of a joint manual, simulation exercises, the exchange of personal, and training. While still young, this form of cooperation shows much promise in an increasingly important region of the world. This study describes civil security cooperation within the BEAR. In particular, it provides an overview of the regional organizations’ cultural, legal and institutional design and it describes the relationships between BEAR and its member states, citizens and stakeholder. The final section of this article also assesses the current state of play by analyzing the effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy of BEAR in relation to its civil security activities.
This study describes the current state of play and historical context of intergovernmental cooperation through the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS) and its engagement with civil security. It addresses the organizational, institutional, and cultural frameworks of the CBSS, as well as the international context within which it is embedded. This provides an important backdrop for describing the civil security system, which the CBSS has fostered for over 20 years. Beginning with the establishment of an expert group on nuclear and radiological safety in 1992, the CBSS now participates in a wide range of cooperative endeavours, such as information exchange on forest firefighting and environmental pollution. This study also assesses CBSS civil security along three indicators that highlight the extent to which the system is effective, efficient and legitimate. It is argued that the CBSS is a regional organization that finds its strength as a platform for facilitating and encouraging cooperation on civil security; however, its actual capacity as an actor in civil security area remains low.
In recent years, we have learned that forced global migration pose a serious threat to international peace and societal values. Despite the many warnings and refugee crises across the world, most national governments have insufficiently addressed this threat. In this chapter, we try to explain this lack of action. The chapter explores possible explanations such as the denial mindset of “it probably won’t happen here (and if it does, it won’t affect my family and community)”. The chapter focuses on the border management crisis in Sweden in 2015. The Swedish government did not address the situation as a crisis until the refugees, who had been on the Mediterranean Sea and traversing north over the continent for months, ended up in Malmö in the south of Sweden in September 2015. This predictable set of events caused chaos for the unprepared Swedish police and the border and migration authorities who had to handle the situation under conditions of urgency and apparent uncertainty.