Preventing governance breakdown in the EU's southern neighbourhood: fostering resilience to strengthen security perceptions

To what extent does societal resilience help to prevent governance breakdown? The EU's southern neighbourhood has been troubled by multiple security risks in recent years. The security situation of many citizens is uncertain and local populations frequently feel insecure, an indication of governance breakdown. Resilience has become a new focus in preventing a breakdown of governance. Yet, the extent to which resilience can help prevent governance breakdown remains unclear. Building on original survey data from Libya and Tunisia this study contributes empirical evidence to the debate. The article shows that limited statehood and order contestation do not necessarily lead to a breakdown of governance. Although both risks affect Tunisia and Libya to different degrees none of them are strongly correlated with the security perceptions of local populations. Additionally, resilience is key in preventing governance breakdown. Social trust and the legitimacy of governance actors are two main sources of resilience helping to prevent a breakdown of governance. Moreover, resilience has divergent effects on different dimensions of security governance breakdown. While resilience has stronger effects on national security perceptions, local security considerations are partly driven by other factors such as individuals' economic resources

Strengthening resilience in the EU's neighbourhood

This policy paper contributes to the debate on the implementation of the new resilience paradigm central to the EU‘s Global Strategy. It argues that the EU should clearly distinguish between regime stability as the capacity to persist or ‘bounce back’, and resilience as societal capacities to undergo processes of adaptation and transformation. Moreover, the EU should focus on legitimate institutions, appropriate institutional design, and social trust when strengthening resilience in its neighbourhood. In order to help build resilience the EU needs to know its neighbours, find the right partners in its neighbourhood, and provide the policy space for new resilience partnerships to develop

Theorizing resilience-building in the EU's neighbourhood: introduction to the special issue

The EU is surrounded by areas of limited statehood (ALS) and contested orders (CO) in its southern and eastern neighbourhood. Resilience has become a focus of attention in the academic debate on how to successfully deal with ALS and CO. Moreover, resilience-building is a new cornerstone in the EU's foreign and security policy. However, to what extent is resilience a mechanism to cope with ALS and CO? What are the sources of resilience? To what extent does the EU act as a resilience builder or spoiler in its neighbourhood? By presenting a new conceptual framework for analysing the interplay between risks, resilience, and governance breakdown/violent conflict as well as through in-depth empirical evidence, this special issue puts forward three key arguments. First, resilience is a key mechanism to prevent governance breakdown and violent conflict in the EU's neighbourhood. Second, three sources are key in building resilience: Social trust within societies and communities, legitimacy of (state and non-state) governance actors and institutions, as well as effective, fair, and inclusive governance institutions. Third, if external actors, such as the EU, seek to build resilience, they need to factor in long-time horizons, in-depth local knowledge, and a clearly designed strategy

Quantitative risk assessment tools for the EU's Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods

Understanding and anticipating violent conflict and the breakdown of governance in the European Union (EU) neighbourhood is complex. However, it is of great value for academia and EU foreign policy. How can the EU know about, prepare for, and possibly help prevent governance breakdown and violent conflict in its neighbourhood? To answer this question, we propose innovative quantitative approaches to capture violent conflict and governance breakdown through survey-based and non-survey-based data at the sub-national level. We assess different theoretical approaches to explaining violent conflict and governance breakdown with a focus on social resilience. Moreover, we discuss numerous methodological tools including random forests, Bayesian methods, and change point analysis. The paper highlights the possibility of measuring and predicting violent conflict and governance breakdown in the EU neighbourhood at the sub-national level. We underline our arguments with initial empirical analyses. Further, we point to several research gaps such as the necessity to develop data collection efforts in order to build analyses and predictions on better data

More Security, More Trust? Security Perceptions as a Source of Government Trust in Post-Conflict Settings

How can governments gain the trust of their citizens after civil war? Although previous work has thoroughly considered the drivers of governmental trust, we know relatively little about the role of security perceptions in post-conflict settings. Drawing on data from an original survey fielded with 2,000 respondents from Liberia, we show that citizens' security perceptions shape their trust in government. We also demonstrate that explicit attribution of security to specific institutions is key for linking more effective security governance with more trust. Our findings have significant implications for the design of security institutions and statebuilding in post-conflict settings

Taking a New Perspective. Mapping the Al Qaeda Network through the Eyes of the UN Security Council

Network analysis has attracted significant attention when researching the phenomenon of transnational terrorism, particularly Al Qaeda. While many scholars have made valuable contributions to mapping Al Qaeda, several problems remain due to a lack of data and the omission of data provided by international organizations such as the UN. Thus, this article applies a social network analysis and subsequent mappings of the data gleaned from the Security Council's consolidated sanctions list, and asks what they can demonstrate about the structure and organizational characteristics of Al Qaeda. The study maps the Al Qaeda network on a large scale using a newly compiled data set. The analysis reveals that the Al Qaeda network consists of several hundred individual and group nodes connecting almost all over the globe. Several major nodes are crucial for the network structure, while simultaneously many other nodes only weakly and foremost regionally connect to the network. The article concludes that the findings tie in well to the latest research pointing to local and simultaneously global elements of Al Qaeda, and that the new data is a valuable source for further analyses, potentially in combination with other data

Theorizing resilience-building in the EU’s neighbourhood: introduction to the special issue

The EU is surrounded by areas of limited statehood (ALS) and contested orders (CO) in its southern and eastern neighbourhood. Resilience has become a focus of attention in the academic debate on how to successfully deal with ALS and CO. Moreover, resilience-building is a new cornerstone in the EU’s foreign and security policy. However, to what extent is resilience a mechanism to cope with ALS and CO? What are the sources of resilience? To what extent does the EU act as a resilience builder or spoiler in its neighbourhood? By presenting a new conceptual framework for analysing the interplay between risks, resilience, and governance breakdown/violent conflict as well as through in-depth empirical evidence, this special issue puts forward three key arguments. First, resilience is a key mechanism to prevent governance breakdown and violent conflict in the EU’s neighbourhood. Second, three sources are key in building resilience: Social trust within societies and communities, legitimacy of (state and non-state) governance actors and institutions, as well as effective, fair, and inclusive governance institutions. Third, if external actors, such as the EU, seek to build resilience, they need to factor in long-time horizons, in-depth local knowledge, and a clearly designed strategy

Power law jumps and power law waiting times, fractional calculus and human mobility in epidemiological systems

International audienceIn human mobility not only power law jumps but also non-exponential waiting times of power law type have been reported to be important, at least in the analysis of surro-gate data of such human mobility. More recently much improved algorithms have been developed for power law jump distributions and power law waiting time distributions. We improve the analysis of these methods by avoiding histograms via using less data or simulation hungry ordering methods, similar to what is used e.g. in Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests. Then we investigate these new possibilities to analyse such systems of power laws in jumps and waiting times and its connections with fractional calculus and their potential in analyzing human mobility in application to epidemiology, especially dengue fever epidemiology in Thailand. It turns out that inhomogeneities in population densities already can be used to model human mobility and subsequently epidemiological spreading, e.g. via models mimiking radiation. Such models also present already c CMMSE Power laws and fractional calculus power laws in their jump distributions, and could be combined with information on waiting times to improve accuracy in describing the dengue fever spreading between provinces in Thailand