In the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2025’s chapter dedicated to Civil Security for Society, we can read the following statement:
In the field of security research, it is particularly important that projects take into account human factors and the societal context, and ensure the respect of fundamental rights, including privacy and protection of personal data. Citizens and communities should be engaged, for example in assessing the societal impact of security technologies, to improve the quality of results and to build public trust. (page 8)
As EU-funded security research unfolded throughout the years since its inception in 2007, it became clear that citizen participation in security research was very scarce, despite citizens being the subjects on which the technologies, procedures, and methodologies developed in the projects would be applied. In other words, while industry, research institutions, and governmental agencies were often participants in European projects, citizens were widely excluded from these processes (for more detail see, TRANSCEND deliverable Mapping the European Landscape of CSOs engaged in Security Research).
As a result, different measures were adopted, namely through the promotion of civil society organization (CSO) involvement in security research projects funded by the EU and, in some cases, through the formal requirement of CSOs participation for the project to be eligible (for example in the HORIZON-CL3-2024-FCT-01-05 call for projects on combating hate speech online and offline – see the General Conditions). The implied assumption here is that CSOs ‘represent’ or ‘gatekeep’ for civil society (both contested terms) and can act as intermediaries of wider, general societal needs and concerns. But is this as straightforward as it looks like?
In our research within the TRANSCEND project, we use a definition of CSO introduced by the 2007– 2008 Advisory Group on CSOs and Aid Effectiveness, now adopted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, and referred to in United Nations Development Programme publications:
“[CSOs] can be defined to include all non-market and nonstate organizations outside of the family in which people organize themselves to pursue shared interests in the public domain. Examples include community-based organizations and village associations, environmental groups, women’s rights groups, farmers’ associations, faith-based organizations, labour unions, co-operatives, professional associations, chambers of commerce, independent research institutes and the not-for-profit media.” (OECD 2010, cit. in UNDP 2013: 123).
Furthermore,
“CSOs are voluntary organizations with governance and direction coming from citizens or constituency members, without significant government-controlled participation or representation” (idem).
This wide definition of CSOs triggers a reflection on the interests that they pursue as part of their raison d´être. Different CSOs pursue different objectives, and these can be compatible among themselves but also fundamentally contradictory. From this standpoint, we can conclude that CSOs introduce the perspectives of the specific publics they emerge from. For example, a data protection CSO represents publics that are affected by the processing of their personal data. In this line of thinking, CSOs act as “spokespersons” of publics following an understanding that “someone or something can act as a spokesperson because they literally speak for someone else” (Pelizza 2021, 495). But that does not mean that they speak for the whole civil society. Indeed, we understand CSOs as ‘speaking’ for the parts of civil society they seek to represent.
While this conclusion may sound obvious, it carries some important implications. The most important one is that simply including CSOs in security R&D processes will not automatically and inevitably eliminate the problems of representativity and public engagement with science and technology. In other words, it is important to critically evaluate how a specific CSO can positively impact R&D processes, rather than seeing CSO participation as a box-ticking exercise that will automatically grant increased levels of legitimacy to a project.
In border management, for example, a large number of the people affected by border policies are not EU citizens, and therefore cannot participate in the processes through which EU and EU member-state border management policies are formulated and border management technologies are developed. The civil society that does get involved is often not truly representative of the ones that are greatly affected by border management. This constitutes an important blind spot that a mere claim for further civil society participation cannot alone resolve, as CSO involvement still occurs within the dominant power relations of security.
Indeed, there is a valid question whether CSOs can represent a wider public, since they often are specialized organizations in a particular domain. While the concept of “mini-publics” – i.e., “groups small enough to be genuinely deliberative, and representative enough to be genuinely democratic” (Goodin and Dryzek 2006, 220) – could be argued to alleviate this issue, conceptualizing CSOs through publics is much more complex. CSOs are deliberative and representative in a sense that they usually materialize wider aspects of civil societies into tangible organizational structures that (may) participate in political processes. However, CSOs are often specialized organizations, that pursue one specific interest, and thus, the question remains whether CSOs work as ‘public’ or rather as a form of legitimization of a particular interest. In this sense, CSOs provide access to these domains, but not to the civil society as a whole.
CSO involvement is not necessarily intended in terms of contestation, but rather, to provide a semblance of wider public access. In that sense, ‘mini-publics’ are helpful to understand how CSO involvement is envisioned by the EU in security R&D, but not necessarily in how this involvement plays out. Rather, what CSOs often do is materializing what Timothy Mitchell (2009) has fittingly described as the “rule of experts”, where specialized knowledges determine wider political decisions.
Security R&D is shaped by specific circulations of knowledge and power structures, often characterised through matters of secrecy and opacity (Martins 2023). While the EU’s Framework Programmes are usually quite public in terms of providing information, the way they are shaped by security knowledge and imaginaries remains nevertheless outside of the public realm. Christensen and Liebetrau (2019) conceptualize the role of the public in security matters as dual-faced – they are simultaneously seeking to be protected through security measures and guarantee democratic accountability. In the case of CSOs operating in the field of security R&D, this applies to multiple dimensions of their work, in terms of representing how technologies and procedures should work to the advantage of publics and in terms of guaranteeing that they remain in the confines of democratic politics and do not emerge as excessive instruments of power.
Some of these dynamics are complex and hard to counter at the macro level, but there are measures that can be taken. In the TRANSCEND project, we reflect on these measures and seek to implement them. We have multiple engagements with CSOs through different formats, be it in 1-to-1 meetings, in conference calls, through the TRANSCEND Network, and often as experts in our activities. Moreover, we are currently tailoring training material for CSOs as part of wider citizen engagement efforts. The lessons learned through these interactions will be an important part of the project’s legacy and inform our forthcoming outputs, particularly the Toolbox.
Written by Bruno Oliveira Martins, PRIO, Lise Endregard Hemat, PRIO, Clemens Binder, University of Copenhagen
To know more:
Bigo, D., Jeandesboz, J., Martin-Maze, M., & Ragazzi, F. (2014). Review of Security Measures in the 7th Research Framework Programme FP7 2007-2013. European Parliament. https://doi.org/10.2861/62647
Binder, Clemens (2024) The technopolitics of border security R&D: Shaping the EU’s border in the Security Research Programme. Security Dialogue 55 (6):5532-569.
Broomfield, Heather, and Lisa Reutter (2022) In Search of the Citizen in the Datafication of Public Administration. Big Data & Society 9 (1): 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221089302.
Brown, Mark B. (2009) Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Christensen, Kristoffer Kjærgaard, and Tobias Liebetrau. 2019. “A New Role for ‘the Public’? Exploring Cyber Security Controversies in the Case of WannaCry.” Intelligence and National Security 34 (3): 395–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2019.1553704.
European Commission (2020a) Responsible research & innovation. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/responsible-research-innovation.
European Commission (2022) “Horizon Europe Work Programme 2023-2024, 6. Civil Security for Society.” https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding-opportunities/funding- programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe/horizon-europe-work-programmes
Friedewald, M. et. al (2017). Surveillance, Privacy and Security: Citizens’ Perspectives. Routledge.
Goodin, Robert E., and John S. Dryzek (2006) Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political Uptake of Mini-Publics. Politics & Society 34 (2): 219–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329206288152.
Jones, Chris, Kilpatrick, Jane, Maccanico, Yasha (2022). At what cost? Funding the EU’s security, defence, and border policies, 2021–2027. Statewatch. Transnational Institute. Available at https://www.statewatch.org/publications/reports-and-books/at-what-cost-funding- the-eu-s-security-defence-and-border-policies-2021-2027/ (Accessed 02.02.2023)
Martins, Bruno Oliveira. 2023. Security Knowledges: Circulation, Control, and Responsible Research and Innovation in EU Border Management. Science as Culture 32(3): 435-459.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Monsees,
OECD (2010) Civil Society and Aid Effectiveness: Findings, Recommendations and Good Practice. Available at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/civil-society-and-aid-effectiveness_9789264056435-en.
Pelizza, Annalisa (2021) Identification as Translation: The Art of Choosing the Right Spokespersons at the Securitized Border. Social Studies of Science, 51(4): 487-511 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720983932.
Pinter, F. 2001. Funding Global Civil Society Organisations. In Anheier, H., M. Glasius, & M. Kaldor (Eds.) Global Civil Society. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
The Engage2020 Consortium. (2014). “D3.2 Public Engagement Methods and Tools”. October 2014. Available at http://engage2020.eu/media/D3-2-Public-Engagement-Methods-and-Tools- 3.pdf.
United Nations Development Programme (2013) Working with Civil Society in Foreign Aid. Available at: https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publications/2013_UNDP-CH-Working-With-Civil-Society-in-Foreign-Aid_EN.pdf.
