Bigo et al (2007) Mapping the Field of EU Internal Security Agencies

This study is the result of a collective endeavour aiming at documenting, analysing, and understanding the dynamics underlying the European field of security. It has been constituted by the whole of the French Team (WP2) of the CHALLENGE project. The results presented in this study allow for preliminary conclusions regarding the overall processes underlying the European field of professionals of security. It also provides, along with four deliverables already produced with substantial empirical details concerning the field’s main agencies and institutions. However, both from the point of view of the empirica research and the possible conclusions, this research is far from completed. It should hence be seen as a work in progress and one of the parts, although an important one, of an ongoing research rather than as an end-result.

Whereas the overall methodology of the mapping project – as it was originally conceived of – has already been detailed in a previous deliverable, the specific methodology followed in this study is slightly less ambitious and slightly more precise. Indeed, it is to provide with the crucial empirical and analytical “building blocks” that are to allow – along with the research yet to be carried out – fulfilling the aims set out by our research project. Moreover, from the point of view of the empirical research, the scope of the quantitative and qualitative data has here been limited to a few of the security-sites (agencies, institutions, professionals, sectors…) that the research will ultimately cover. The focus will here mainly be put on the European security agencies having a clearly stated legal status such as the European Police Office (EUROPOL), the European Judicial Cooperation Unit (EUROJUST) and the European Anti-Fraud Unit (OLAF), involved in the European sub-field of police cooperation and judicial cooperation in criminal affairs, as well as the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders (FRONTEX). The role of security technologies and data-bases in the European field of professionals of security has also been scrutinized and will here allow for crucial insights.