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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., Creeping crisis

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.

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.

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.

EUROSEC

In an era of transboundary crises, Europe faces the daunting challenge of coordinating joint responses in an effective and timely way. Recent transboundary crises such as the Icelandic Ash Cloud (2010), food contamination incidents and the financial breakdown revealed a key part of that challenge: sifting through relevant information, building an accurate picture of what is happening, and communicating that analysis to political decision-makers. Academic researchers refer to this process in terms of ‘sense-making’. To create joint capacity for sense-making is one of the prominent elements of the EU’s ambitions to play a role in the management of transboundary crises. The number of early-warning, rapid-alert, and common communication platforms in the EU has multiplied in recent years but with little central guidance or overall rationale. This report tries to ‘make sense of sense-making’ tools in the EU by providing the most comprehensive overview to date. We ask what sense-making tools are available at the EU level, document what they are intended to do, and explore what these tools offer in terms of ‘added-value’ to European states. Using official documents, secondary literature and interviews with policy officials, this report maps the sense-making landscape of the EU. After drawing out key patterns and offering an inventory of tools relevant to sense-making, we conclude by discussing the problems and prospects of the EU’s role.

Programmet för europeisk säkerhetsforskning

Samförfattad med ett tiotal forskare, Programmet för europeisk säkerhetsforskning

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.

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.