Search

The data fusion methods, techniques and tools are regarded as a remedy for shortcomings of information/knowledge management and intelligence production. They also address current needs of the holistic, all-source approach to intelligence. Their implementation means the creation of new organizational elements − ‘fusion centers’. The concept of a fusion center has been introduced to and tested in the European Union for years. This paper examines data fusion processes and elements within the EU and focuses on intelligence fusion capabilities developed under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The examples of the Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC) and EU Hybrid Fusion Cell in the Intelligence and Situation Center (INTCEN) are examined to evaluate challenges, opportunities and limitations of EU intelligence fusion elements. This paper is also an effort to indicate that there are still many elements to be improved within the EU intelligence establishment, including the area of data and information fusion – with the overall aim to effectively and timely support CSDP. Intelligence sharing by Member States with the EU remains one of the main impediments.

Contemporary security is shaped by a variety of factors which determine the changing dynamics of connections and interdependencies within and between social groups and political actors. The growing importance of technology and innovation for states and societies has been a critical factor in the infrastructural, organizational and decision-making dimensions. This article aims to integrate some aspects of contemporary security into current dynamics of technology and innovation as vehicles of rapid and substantial changes in security policies and actions. Designed as an essay based on qualitative method in social sciences, this paper raises theoretical and empirical questions concerning modernization and innovation as determinants of contemporary security structures and policies. The empirical dimension of technology, innovation and politics are presented in the microscale (local security), in the mesoscale (state security, national security, sectoral security) and in the macroscale (international security in regional and global dimensions), as well as from the cross-sectional (transversal) perspective.

This article tackles the issue of legal regulation of the use of force by the European Union based on the example of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), operating in the EU’s area of freedom, security, and justice. Due to the risks and threats related to border protection and migration management, Frontex has been endowed with extensive powers to use force in its operations. Using the concept of institutional isomorphism, the author argues that Frontex’s activities in the face of specific and extremely difficult challenges at the external borders of the EU have become a component of operations undertaken by the border services of the Member States, leading to an isomorphic “merging” of the activities of EU agencies and national border services, including the legal dimension of the use of force.

This article presents one of the most salient aspects of the migration crisis in the EU, namely the turbulent management of external borders, and analyzing it in the case of the central region of the Mediterranean Sea. The study is focused on risks and threats to the security of the European Union and its member states, particularly Italy, posed by negative aspects of migratory flows and accompanying phenomena such as migrant smuggling, trafficking in human beings, drug smuggling or document frauds. For this purpose, a concept of ‘extended borderland’ is applied as particularly suitable for analyzing border-security policies and actions undertaken by the European Union. The argument developed in this article is that the Central Mediterranean area has been converted into an extended borderland where conventional systems, methods and tools of border management are superseded by spatial taming created by international actors acting through joint maritime operations.