Assessing Evolving Concepts of Security

The core objective of the Evolving Concept of Security (EvoCS) project is to offer a clear yet detailed overview of security concerns that exist in different regions of the European Union. A proper understanding of these concerns is vital to both effective and representative priority setting in European security policymaking. The results of the EvoCS project are therefore intended to be directly relevant to security policy makers and security research and development planners at the European Commission. The EvoCS project also offers a general model, which relies on a combination of quantitative and qualitative inputs, to assess regional and temporal variation in security concerns in the future. This document sets forth the analytical framework guiding the research conducted in the EvoCS project. It elaborates on the vision, introduces key methodological concepts and describes operational research guidelines. Accompanying this document is an online repository which is only accessible to members of the Consortium. Policymakers interested predominantly in the background of the EvoCS project need not read more than the introduction. The methodologically inclined reader who would like to know more about the research design of a project stretching twelve countries and executed by four different research teams, might wish to read the document in full. The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies OF 4 49 INTRODUCTION The European project was initiated to end the frequent and devastating wars between European countries. The idea was that economic interdependence and shared prosperity would lead to greater political stability and security. After the end of the Cold War, the European Union (EU) expanded rapidly. In 2013, 62 years after the birth of the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Union welcomed its 28th member Croatia. The EU now comprises a diverse set of countries and peoples, which is rooted in different historical orientations, geographical circumstances, sociodemographic compositions, and security perceptions. Commonality of interests continues to be a key driver of the European project. Yet diversity has undeniably become a core characteristic of the Union. At the EU level this poses new difficulties for establishing common security policies that address shared security challenges and do justice to different European security concerns. A clear understanding of these concerns is vital to both effective and representative priority setting for security policies, including research and development activities in fields such as natural hazard mitigation, cyber privacy, crisis management, and border control. Precisely to facilitate the development of EU security policies that meet security concerns across all Member States, the EU FP7 project “Evolving Concept of Security” (EvoCS) was conceived of and funded by the EU Commission. The overarching objective of EvoCS is to come to a better understanding of different European security concepts and the salience of their respective core values, actors, levels, security challenges (threats, hazards, risks), and ethical and human rights issues. The very nature of security concepts can be assessed by looking at how different political actors across Europe prioritise different core values and perceive different risks, how they address them at different levels, and how they give different levels of attention to different problems across time. This increased understanding should provide input to assess whether EU planning and research priorities in the security domain are reflective of the regional security concepts or whether some of these are underrepresented or omitted altogether. The objective of EvoCS is therefore to elicit different regional concepts of security in such a way that: • the findings can be used as input by security stakeholders such as security policy makers and security R&D planners at the Commission (including Strategic Advisory Group); • the findings can be used as input for other Commission co-funded projects; • the project serves as a model of how to periodically assess these evolving concepts of security. The present document, which is the official Deliverable 3.1 (D3.1), sets out the analytical framework. The analytical framework guides the assessment of these security concepts across Europe in the EvoCS project in four different regional case studies. The assessment of these concepts runs in two stages. In stage 1 the regional case study teams will employ the same approach to systematically elicit concepts of security from different sources (government, parliament, academia, media, the private sector and NGOs). In stage 2, the regional case study teams will analyse the results from stage 1 in desk research and a series of workshops held around Europe in early 2015 (see Figure 1). In the present deliverable the research protocol for stage 1 is described in elaborate detail. In so doing, it introduces an understanding of concepts of security The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies OF 5 49 • by defining their most important characteristics, • which are assessed by identifying measurable indicators, • which are created by coding pieces of evidence from a variety of sources. The protocol begins by setting out a vision for how concepts of security are defined, including the various characteristics they consist of, and how to assess whether they are important. The research design that will govern the creation of the quantitative indicators is then presented, before offering individual descriptions as well as a coding framework for the pieces of evidence. The document proceeds by reflecting on the cross-comparability of different country results and suggests a number of good practices for normalisation (at the country level) and aggregation (to the regional level) of the results. Finally, a description will be provided on how the research activities in stage 2 can build on the research results from stage 1, in addition to describing the content and format of the final report of the four regional case studies. # Figure 1 Research Program of the EvoCS Project The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies OF 6 49 The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies OF 7 49 1 VISION 1 VISION The first step in this project is to set out how concepts of security can be envisaged and to describe the various dimensions of which they consist. The very subject matter of a concept of security must first be defined. We therefore start off with a discussion of security and securitisation and identify the building blocks, which together make up security concepts. Later we talk about how these security concepts vary over time and across different regions. Having coined the meaning of a security concept, the term salience is introduced to explain how we ascertain the extent to which a security concept is prevalent, important, or indeed, salient for the purposes of our project. Greater details are then provided on the specific building blocks or characteristics of security concepts, in the process offering definitions and descriptions. 1.1 SECURITY AND SECURITISATION This research project is about security and therefore must limit the scope of discussion to securitised matters—issues which in various discourses are conceived of as security concepts. This project therefore approaches security a socially constructed phenomenon. 1 2 In other words, it only exists (or does not exist) in the experience and therefore perception of people. Against this background, this project neither sets out to create a universal definition of security nor does it attempt to identify purported ‘real’ risks that affect security. Thus it is recognised that in some cases there may be a complex and interesting relationship between what some would call actual (‘objective’) rather than perceived (‘subjective’) security risks, however these aspects are not included with the scope of this study. Rather, we assume that definitions of security can and will vary across different political actors and across time, as will their appreciation of its importance. This project looks at security discourses, in which multiple actors use claims and actions such as statements and speeches to contribute to shared understandings of what security is (or is not) about. Our dependent variable then is an entirely subjective notion of security. We are chiefly concerned with perceptions (see Figure 2). The term concept of security refers to an overall notion of what the term security encompasses. Each concept of security has characteristics which set it apart from others, based on different dimensions. These five dimensions are its core values, the political actors involved, the types of security challenges (risks, threats and hazards) affecting 3 4 these core values; the levels at which security is protected; and the ethical and human rights issues which present themselves in this process. The dimensions together form a 5 concept of security at a specific moment in time. These concepts can vary across regions and evolve over time. What we are looking for in 6 this regard is how the importance of each dimension evolves, relative to the importance of the others. In order to assess the importance of a given dimension, we introduce the term salience, which is a more refined notion that helps in gauging the relative importance of these dimensions to the actors involved. The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies OF 8 49 # Figure 2 Creating Concepts of Security 1.2 SALIENCE To capture the nuances in how far a given concept has currency within a given country, we introduce the term salience. Salience is a debated concept in social sciences, and no commonly accepted definition exists. We conceive of salience as the importance political actors attach to an issue as a function of the degree to which they experience a problem in relation to the issue at hand. Two important considerations underlie our use of the term. 7 The first is that we need more pr