Searching for a Strategy for the European Union’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice

This book examines the vision and strategy of the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ), which has become one of the key objectives of the European Union (EU). Recent events have also highlighted the saliency of several of the policy issues at the heart of the AFSJ. Amongst them, one can mention the terrorist attacks in 2015 in Paris and 2016 in Brussels and the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean region.

At the same time, the end of the Stockholm programme, which provided the strategic framework for the development of the AFSJ between 2010 and 2014, has been followed by the adoption of new ‘strategic guidelines’, which can only be described as a short, vague and general document. It is therefore paradoxical that, at a time when AFSJ matters - such as asylum, migration, borders, terrorism, police and judicial cooperation – have never been so salient, the EU finds itself, for the first time ever, devoid of any significant, over-arching strategy for the development of its AFSJ.

This book was published as a special issue of European Politics and Society.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Beyond Stockholm: in search of a strategy for the European Union’s Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice (by Sarah Léonard and Christian Kaunert)

1. Deliberating justice policy in the European Union: a discursive perspective on day-to-day decision-making in European Union’s criminal justice cooperation (by Santino Lo Bianco)

2. The development of the external dimension of the AFSJ – new challenges of the EU legal and policy framework (by
Maria O’Neill)

3. The political-legal nexus in EU counter-terrorism: an assessment of the two-track influences between the EU and the UN (by Bruno Oliveira Martins)

4. Solidarity and sharing in the Common European Asylum System: the case of Syrian refugees (by Eleni Karageorgiou)

5. The EU as a Promoter of Preventive Criminal Justice and the Internal Security Context (by Ester Herlin-Karnell)

6. EU internal security goverance and national risk assessments: towards a common technocratic model? (by
Raphael Bossong and Hendrik Hegemann)

7. The effect of Frontex’s risk analysis on the European border controls (by Satoko Horii)

8. When (In)security travels: Europeanisation and migration in Poland (by Alexandra Schwell)