H2020 Project “Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and the Rule of Law”

(RECONNECT)

ESPOL-LAB is partner in the project RECONNECT (Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and the Rule of Law). This multi-disciplinary project funded by the European Union under the framework programme H2020. The project brings together 18 academic partner institutions from 14 countries, coordinated by KU Leuven. RECONNECT aims at understanding and providing solutions to the recent challenges faced by the European Union. With an explicit focus on strengthening the EU’s legitimacy through democracy and the rule of law, RECONNECT seeks to build a new narrative for Europe, enabling the EU to become more attuned to the expectations of its citizens. A special focus is on EU economic and fiscal policy, on terrorism, international commerce and on migration. Members of ESPOL-LAB contribute particularly to work package 6 ‘Practices of democracy’ and in work package 11 ‘Counter-terrorism’. Read more

Project “Digital government”

(PIA DUNE EPHEMER)

ESPOL-LAB participates in the EPHEMER project (‘Ethics and Holoptic Pedagogy for Network-Based Teaching’), funded by ANR as part of the DUNE Future Investment Plan (Development of Experimental Digital Universities). The project, which is carried out within the ICL by the ETHICS research group, develops an experimental methodology for integrating ethical concerns into teaching. Since 2017, ESPOL-LAB hosts a three-year post-doctoral researcher, Zach Bastick who is developing experiments on the digital aspects of democracy. This innovative approach aims to enable students to confront ethical considerations of contemporary issues, including Artificial Intelligence, the digital divide, and online discrimination. The students shall become active actors in their own pedagogy, critically approach emerging issues of digital politics, and analyse the dynamics of their individual and group responses. The project is transversal and promotes interdisciplinary collaborations within the fields of experimental political science, psychology, commerce and law.

Collaborative Observatory on Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism and Violence

(O.C.T.A.V.)

ESPOL-LAB participates in the ‘Collaborative Observatory on Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism and Violence’ (O.C.T.A.V.). This is an initiative of scientists from various disciplinary backgrounds, supported and funded by LabToP-CRESPPA-Paris8-CNRS, ESPOL-ICL, REPI-ULB and CERI-SciencesPo/CNRS. Its members address issues related to “terrorism” and “anti-terrorism” by questioning their relationship to the contemporary transformations of violence and politics. To this end, O.C.T.A.V.’s activities are carried out in two formats: a university research seminar and a series of “practitioner meetings” (under Chatham House Rules) with professionals from the fields of security, defence, intelligence, justice and social work. The sessions of the research seminar and the practitioner meetings alternate around the same theme.

The working group emerged from the observation that there have never been as many episodes of so-called “terrorist” violence as there have been since the 1970s and the gradual institutionalisation, in France, Europe and the United States of what we have come to call “anti-terrorism”. This does not suggest that “anti-terrorism” would generate “terrorist” violence, it rather means to reject the terrorism/anti-terrorism opposition that has structured political, media and expert discourse ever since. From the 1970s onwards, largely fuelled by experts and the media, the political discourse has constantly pitted “terrorism” against “anti-terrorism”, exclusively presenting the latter as the state’s response to “terrorist” violence. In so doing, the political discourse ignores the mimicry of practices which, since that time, is at the heart of the emergence of anti-terrorism: the more “terrorism” has been described as a new form of violence whose entrepreneurs would act as a network, the more security, defence and intelligence actors have been called upon to organise themselves in turn as a network, via increased use of computing tools, and to develop a renewed form of state intervention against the violence labelled as “terrorist”. It is this renewed form of state intervention against so-called terrorist violence that is now called anti-terrorism.