The CHALLENGE project seeks to provide a critical assessment of the liberties of citizens and others living within the EU and how they are affected by the proliferation of debate concerning insecurity and the exchange of new techniques of surveillance and control.
The authors write: "Five years after 9/11, no one doubts that liberal polities have resorted to many illiberal practices, or that these practices have been legitimised by sweeping claims about global dangers. Their scale is both revealed and obscured by inquiries into the war in Iraq. Serious dangers are apparent, but who can now say that the connection between such dangers and the mobilisation of tougher practices of security and constraints on liberal freedoms is clear?...The tendency to focus narrowly on the conflict in Iraq obscures a broader pattern of surveillance in which illiberal practices are being justified by a complex field of routinised transactions among many transnationally organised agencies, institutions and interests, one that also thrives on weak claims to knowledge and apocalyptic visions of a dangerous future."
