This article investigates the evolving security practices of one of the key actors in the handling of asylum-seekers and migrants at the external borders of the European Union (EU) Member States, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, widely referred to as ‘Frontex’. It does so by applying a revised version of the Copenhagen School’s securitisation framework, which focuses on security practices and is underpinned by an understanding of security as belonging to a continuum. The article compares and contrasts the practices of Frontex in the context of two significant ‘migration crises’ in the Mediterranean, in 2005–2006 and 2015–2016, respectively. The analysis of the more recent practices of the Agency following the 2015–2016 ‘migration crisis’ shows that this ‘crisis’ has led to an intensification of the security practices of the Agency. Frontex has moved towards the end point of the continuum, which is characterised by survival, existential threats, and militarisation. This has contributed to a spiralling of the securitisation of migration in the EU.

This article explores the recent and significant growth of European Union cooperation on counter-terrorism by drawing upon the concept of ‘collective securitisation’. It highlights how 9/11 was a precipitating event, one which led some EU leaders to call upon the member states to develop an EU counter-terrorism policy and to step up counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States. Various counter-terrorism legislative instruments have since been adopted, defining terrorist acts and having a significant impact on national counter-terrorism policies. 9/11 was therefore used by some actors to convince the EU member states that they all faced one collective terrorist threat, embodied at the time by al-Qaeda, rather than each of them facing a distinctive threat as had hitherto been a common view across Europe. This was a crucial moment, in other words, paving the way for the development of a common EU counter-terrorism policy. The subsequent institutionalisation of this cooperation, in particular through the establishment of the European Arrest Warrant, the Counter Terrorism Coordinator and the European Counter Terrorism Centre within Europol, has contributed to a routinisation of counter-terrorism practices in the EU.

This article contributes to the debates on de-centring the analysis of migration governance in Europe by focusing on the potential role of external actors in the securitisation of asylum and migration in the European Union (EU). Although there has been a growing amount of literature on the securitisation of asylum and migration in the EU, the role possibly played by external actors in this securitisation process has not been considered to date. This article addresses this gap using the case of Turkey. Theoretically, it contributes to the development of the securitisation framework by de-centring the study of securitisation processes. It argues that, from the vantage point of an external actor, a securitisation process highlights the existence of a vulnerability to a specific phenomenon that is perceived to be threatening. An external actor can then decide to exploit this vulnerability for its own gain, notably by making threats that play on the fears of the other political actor. Empirically, the article demonstrates how the Turkish government has been able to exploit the vulnerability of European countries to migration flows, which had been highlighted by the social construction of asylum and migration as security issues. By repeatedly threatening to send more asylum-seekers and migrants Europe’s way, the Turkish authorities have managed to secure some significant financial and political benefits for themselves in the last few years.

In this article, we analyze the emergence of a global security norm of the COVID-19 epidemic as a threat to international security. This crisis is one of the gravest crises that humanity has experienced since the end of World War II in terms of the number of people infected and died, but also in terms of the economic consequences. Here, we provide a framework for understanding the securitization of the COVID-19 epidemic as an international norm defined and promoted by the World Health Organization as a norm entrepreneur, and cascaded down to the level of member states. We identify the actors who developed the main strategic prescriptions of the security norm and the international mechanisms that promoted the cascading of its contents throughout the international system. We further develop the notion of primary and secondary norms, which explain the striking differences amongst industrialized states with regard to the contents, scope, and implementation timeline of the various measures aiming to curb the spread of the virus.

Previous experimental results have demonstrated that a PET detector module based on a 20times10times10 mm LSO block read out by a Hamamatsu S8550 APD array is able to determine the impinging position of perpendicularly incident 511-keV photons with a resolution better than 2-mm FWHM. A prototype PET demonstrator using two of these detector heads was build and evaluated. The axial and transaxial resolution measured in two-dimensional (2-D) OSEM and 2-D FBP reconstructed images is better than 1.5- and 2-mm FWHM, respectively, for radial distances less than 15 mm. A Monte Carlo simulation showed that a four-ring PET scanner based on these monolithic scintillator blocks has a sensitivity which is about 2.5 times higher than the sensitivity of a similar system equipped with detector heads using a 4times8 matrix of 2times2times10 mm LSO pixels