Arjen Boin, together with Madalina Busuioc and Martijn Groenleer, has a new article titled “Building European Union Capacity to Manage Transboundary crises: Network or Lead-Agency Model?” coming up in Regulation and Governance.

This article explores the growing role of the European Union (EU) in managing transboundary crises. More specifically, it reflects on the different ways in which the expanding contours of the EU’s emerging crisis capacity can be organized.

“News biases relief in favor of certain disaster types and regions: for every person killed in a volcano disaster, 40,000 people must die in a drought to reach the same probability of media coverage. Similarly, it requires 40 times as many killed in an African disaster to achieve the same expected media coverage as for a disaster in Eastern Europe of similar type and magnitude.”

This, and other findings on media coverage of natural disasters are presented in the article “NEWS DROUGHTS, NEWS FLOODS, AND U.S. DISASTER RELIEF” by Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg.

The article has also recieved some attention on the world politics blog The Duck of Minerva.

The European Societal Security Research Group is very proud to announce the publication of a new book by Arjen Boin, Magnus Ekengren and Mark Rhinard: The European Union as Crisis Manager – Patterns and Prospects.

About the book:

The European Union is increasingly being asked to manage crises inside and outside the Union. From terrorist attacks to financial crises, and natural disasters to international conflicts, many crises today generate pressures to collaborate across geographical and functional boundaries. What capacities does the EU have to manage such crises? Why and how have these capacities evolved? How do they work and are they effective? This book offers an holistic perspective on EU crisis management. It defines the crisis concept broadly and examines EU capacities across policy sectors, institutions and agencies. The authors describe the full range of EU crisis management capacities that can be used for internal and external crises. Using an institutionalization perspective, they explain how these different capacities evolved and have become institutionalized. This highly accessible volume illuminates a rarely examined and increasingly important area of European cooperation.

Find the book at Amazon.com or from the publisher Cambridge University Press.

In a new article published in the journal European Security, Erik Brattberg and Mark Rhinard analyses the EU’s global counter-terrorism policies. Click here to read the article.

Abstract

After the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, the European Union (EU) staked its claim as an important international player in the fight against global terrorism. The EU encouraged new initiatives at the United Nations and devoted newfound attention to aid and assistance programs to third states. The EU’s ambitions and heightened activity prompts a number of questions about rhetoric versus action and offers a useful test case for assessing the quality of the EU’s ‘actorness’. This article applies the actorness concept to shed light on the EU’s behaviour in global counter-terrorism activities. It draws together existing insights on actorness into an analytical framework containing four sets of variables – context, coherence, capability and consistency – and applies the framework to evidence gathered on the EU’s international and third country role in countering terrorism. Our results show that the actorness approach sheds considerable light on the EU’s international behaviour in global counter-terrorism and suggests the EU has some way to go before becoming a full actor in this area.

In a new article published in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management entitled “Coordinating for Contingencies: Taking Stock of Post-9/11 Homeland Security Reforms”, Erik Brattberg assesses the U.S. homeland security reforms after 9/11. He concluders that although significant progress has been made, several obstacles with regard to coordination remains

Abstract

Over a decade after September 11, American citizens are still asking themselves: ‘how much safer are we today?’ This question is also pertinent for scholars seeking to understand the post-September 11 homeland security reforms. This paper, drawing on the public administration literature and using Don Kettl’s ‘contingent coordination’ framework, sets out to discuss how well these efforts have addressed the central coordination challenges posed by homeland security. In doing so, it makes two contributions: one methodological (e.g., operationalizing the contingent coordination framework) and one empirical (e.g., assessing the effectiveness of post-9/11 homeland security reforms). The paper concludes with an overall assessment of how to find ways to further strengthen the capacity of the US homeland security system. Article is available here

Mark Rhinard and Daniel Hamilton has contributed with a paper entitled “All for One, One For All: Towards a Transatlantic Solidarity Pledge”, which appeared in the publication “The U.S.-EU Securit yand Justice Agenda in Action, published by the EU Institute for Security Studies (EU-ISS) in January 2012. The paper is available here.

In a contribution to the Bruges Political Research Paper series, published by the College of Europe in Bruges, Erik Brattberg and Mark Rhinard discusses the role of the EU and the US in international disaster relief. The paper can be downloaded here.

In a new article published in the Global Health Governance journal, Mark Rhinard and Erik Brattberg discuss pandemic preparedness in the European Union and United States. The scale of dangers posed by influenza pandemics, combined with a series of actual outbreaks, has led policymakers in both the EU and the US to frame the issue as a security threat and to call for extraordinary action. In the US, the 2006 and 2010 National Security Strategies identified pandemics as a “catastrophic challenge” while the 2006 US Pandemic Plan argued that “pandemics should be viewed as a national security issue.” The EU’s 2008 review of its own European Security Strategy broadened the scope of threats facing the continent to include pandemic influenza. Identifying an influenza pandemic as a security threat, however, is relatively easily done. More challenging is to act upon that designation, through implementing security strategies in practice and managing governance processes in multi-level governance systems. Drawing upon securitization theory and traditional implementation theory, this article compares the extent to which the EU and the US have turned words into action on pandemic preparation. The findings show that increasingly securitized rhetoric following the H5N1 and H1N1 outbreaks has indeed been followed by new policies, structures, and operational capacities. As such, the article provides preliminary evidence that securitizing a public policy problem can increase political leverage over administrative processes of implementation. Click here

In an article in the European Voice, Magnus Ekengren writes about “Preparing the EU for the next disaster”. The article is available online here.