 What do we mean by security? How is the term used in the mainstream media? What do leaders mean by it? When they state that they are protecting our security, should we believe them or do we have reason to be more doubtful? Here to discuss these and other related questions with us is Francesco Strazari, professor of international relations at the Santana School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. His work focuses on security policies, political violence and extra legal governance and geographically on Africa, the Mediterranean and the Balkans. He is founder of the collective blog Security Praxis that provides a platform for discussion of current events and cultural artifacts related to security politics, policies and routines. Greetings and welcome to the first session of the Alternative Security Conference. I would like to invite Professor Francesco Strazari to join us in the session. Thank you, Francesco, for joining us. Hi, everyone. Great. Let's start into the questions. One of your research areas is the transnational organized crime, which policymakers in Europe see it as increasingly important unconventional security threats. So maybe to start our discussion or dialogue, maybe we can start first by just defining what is transnational organized crime within the policymakers' fears and what do they mean by unconventional security threat? Yeah, let's start by what is unconventional because we need to have a sense of what is conventional. When we talk about security, conventional threats, we are typically designing a condition that has to do with national security. With the traditional idea that what is to be secured, the reference object of security is the state against potential aggression, its integrity, its borders are to be protected and kept free from threat or risk. When we talk about the unconventional field of threats, we are typically referring to a broader catalog of threats that materialize in the transnational field, in an area which is transversal and definitely not captured by the idea that the international space is divided by clearly the limited states, sovereign entities where there's a clear inside and an outside and the reference object is sovereign, what is order. In fact, what we see there is what the Daerian and Naira special, international relations specialist, define the metaphysics of western security thinking. That is the idea that we have on the one hand authority, the center, order and identity and on the other hand we have anarchy, we have chaos and we have difference. This is the kind of traditional terms through which thinking about security have been articulated historically. Now, when we talk about unconventional threats, we talk about phenomena that are not easily captured by that representation and that come to the attention of international community mainly by the end of the Cold War and its fixation, let's say, with understanding security in terms of strategic thinking, in terms of nuclear deterrence, in terms of alliances, only where the protagonists, who is to achieve security and provide security is the state only. And the aggressor is typically another state. Now, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the entire understanding of security undergoes a major transformation with the broadening of the catalogue and with the deepening of the levels of analysis from beyond the state as a unit towards the individual on the one hand and the understanding of global security. It is in that context that transnational organized crime that is understood with a lot of ambivalence because we do have, as a matter of fact, an international convention against transnational organized crime that's a Palermo Convention of 2000, but the definition that is given by states there is extremely, extremely broad and, let's say, generic so it doesn't allow discriminating very much about what kind of threat are we addressing. Well, it is from then that we understand that either the domestic dimension of crime goes international and there's a lot of literature. It's quite an alarmistic literature that becomes widespread in the 90s in terms of globalization being taken over or propelled by criminal interests and at the same time there is a kind of resobering a way of analyzing the role that criminal interest and organized crime have in the international space by not only being domestic actors, let's say in Italian Cosa Nostra, going international or transnational, but as a matter of fact, some internationally born new configurations that are possible because they become, they are intimately connected with the legal dimension of international trade and international economy. And so it's not only a shadow, but it's actually interconnected and interwoven with the global markets. So in principle there was a shift after, for example, in Europe, there was a shift going from the national state, the nation state as an enclosed economic sphere to the EU as a broader open market space. There was a shift in this idea of what is crime and what is it, not transnational crime, but transnational conflict, right, if I understood your point correctly, as in the historical narrative. Yes, it's a refocusing on a number of new threats, transnational organized crime is one, the entire emphasis on trafficking, on porous borders, which go, you know, hand in hand with the different understanding of global markets. And the way in which as states are being retreating in their regulatory power and capacity, illicit interests and illicit actors might be propelling globalization through their shadow agendas in the form of extra-legal governance, if you like. Now this is one part of the picture because, you know, the idea that states have been just withdrawing and retreating and just leaving a way to market interest only captures one aspect of the way in which the states have been developing the past few decades. It is a fact that we observe a number of forms of criminalization in a number of areas of goods and services and activities that were not considered illicit beforehand. There's a long history of criminalization from, you know, counterfeited goods to a work of art. And what we see is that, as a matter of fact, the state has been expanding its law enforcement capacity precisely by using the idea that it is fighting organized crime, transnational organized crime, and that new unconventional and non-traditional threats correspond to the emergence of risks for the well-being of our societies, which require stronger powers to fight them. That has been part of the real location of budget to law enforcement and intelligence communities when one could have understood their role being de-emphasized with the end of the equilibrium of terror during the Cold War. But can you give some examples like if we say when we're talking how the budgets are shifting more towards security and intelligence services, so if you look at refugees or migration, if you take this as an example, that's being said that it's a security threat. And we saw, for instance, in Europe, the front-necks, how the budget is increasing to go more in the security direction, but without addressing the roots of the problem, somehow it's just saying that this is an easy solution, let's go through it. Can you elaborate more on how these policies are being generated and developed and what are the forces behind them somehow? Sure, sure. Well, it's a process that the Copenhagen School, to name some academic constellations from the beginning of the 90s, has defined securitization. That's how a given issue, which might be politicized by the political skills or might actually be escalated through a speech actor and being defined as a security threat or even as a military threat when we start talking about migrants invading our countries and the need for protecting our borders. This shift in the mode of representation is something that calls into the game different actors. Migrants can be seen as an economic frontier, as an economic challenge in terms of social integration, in terms of economic opportunity, or they can be seen as a matter of public order, an identity threat, an existential threat, and so on and so forth. This process of refocusing of a number of issue areas towards the security and of the political spectrum is what is typically defined securitization and it typically calls for the adoption of emergential and extraordinary means, preferential lane for giving priority to ways of addressing the problem that are not the way in which, you know, in a parliamentary liberal democracy things should go. That might be exceptions made in the face of the danger that a given phenomena might present. And this is one area where we observe the expansion of the security speak and the adoption of security mode of intervention. It's just one, because as a matter of fact we should probably go back to the matrix of militarized responses for facing with social and political problems, which is the war on drugs. What is declared by President Nixon in 1971 when the definition is offered to the public of drugs being public enemy number one and anything should be done, whatever it takes including the use of the military abroad to tackle what is a problem, a social problem domestically in the United States. That's the beginning of a way of addressing an issue which brings about further reframing in terms of security and even military problems. Yeah, you point out to the war on drugs Bruce Alexander who wrote the book Globalization of Addiction talks about how the war on drugs has kind of made the thing even worse because it didn't deal with the root of the problem which is dislocation, war and isolation and all these things have to be coupled with the modernity somehow. But do you think that for instance the war on drugs is it just mere speculation lack of knowledge or is it there are different forces for example the industries, the military industries who had vested interest in order to get contracts especially in the US where the contracts are privatized or do you see similar approaches in Europe or is it different? Well, there are different things there I mean the war on drugs goes with a strong criminalization of any activities related to drugs on the supply and on the demand side but mainly targeting the supply side through military means the idea of addressing any problem through the security spectrum through the labeling that as a security threat has to do with also the expansion of the idea that the condition of security has to do not only with the existence of tangible palpable threats but also with risks which is a completely different story because a risk is something that is always present where mammals were born insecure and vulnerable and is something that cannot be eliminated but the more the emphasis goes on the idea of risk and therefore the idea of insuring against the risk the more the idea of dealing with everything in terms of security is expanded so what we observed there is that you know migrants drug addiction and dissent armed groups everything undergoes the idea of deep criminalization and dealing with that in terms of strong measures zero tolerance and that kind of jargon which became pretty much mainstream now the problem is that all of that goes without a sober empirical assessment of the results and it is anybody can understand today just to make an example that 20 years on since the war on terror was proclaimed by President George W. Bush the outcome is elusive to say the least if not a disaster in any possible scenarios to the point that states are negotiating with terrorists with the Taliban in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda in the Sahel and this is something anybody can observe but the recipe as such is not publicly acknowledged to be flawed and the same goes with drugs we have decades of illustrations of the way in which criminalization criminalization might have played into the hems of economic interest of organized criminal groups of distorting public debate the public sphere from assessing demand and supply in a balanced way and you know target has been totally missed the idea of containing the use of heavy drugs to only 5% of the global population totally missed and yet states have a problem making steps back from the declaration of war and to the use of the frame of war making to deal with problems because they are afraid of losing legitimacy so much legitimacy has been put into labelling the enemy as terrorists as addicted and so on that is difficult to publicly admit and therefore we observe a fragmented consensus in every area of policy today that is also offering an opportunity by the way yes I have a couple of interesting things that I mean one with that idea of always bringing the war rhetoric we saw it in the pandemic when the French president said okay this is a war we have to be prepared also using this war rhetoric in a corrupted way somehow but when you mentioned how the US was dealing with Taiwan but also they supported them when they were fighting against the USSR so the idea of what is terrorist or who is our enemy and who is our friend also gets corrupted because they and Matt everything shifts based on the ruling interests of certain states so in general the society gets confused who are we supporting and what are the reasons but it's also maybe for a small group of interests You are totally right I mean when we talk about criminalization and organized crime on the one hand and terrorism on the other we are skating on very thin ice in terms of legal consensus and understanding I mean let's start from the criminal side so many it happens so often that criminal elements are co-opted in the context of international military interventions because you don't want them to converge with terrorist jihadists and so on into one single intractable enemy front and therefore who is the criminal and who is just a clientelistic bad guy that we can deal with in terms of stabilizing under a stabilization agenda is something that is very much cast in doubt corrupted elites useful dictators that are basing themselves on generalized stealing or all of that can be condoned if there are higher stakes politically or they are perceived to be higher when it comes to terrorism I mean it goes even beyond the traditional motto whereby someone's freedom fighter is someone else's terrorist today we don't observe any single war front among the many armed conflicts in the world where the enemy is not labelled a terrorist that has to do with a legitimacy question we live at the information age and although we think we are in a post ideological era we are very much inside the ideological era I mean Slavoj Zizek is very much on that point ideology is what is transparent what we don't see what is considered to be common sense and therefore the production of the enemy image and the legitimization of the enemy image and it has to do with the idea that we don't recognize the legitimacy of dissent and of the existence of enemies that are not terrorists that we can negotiate with that we can have to whom we can apply for example the Geneva Conventions in terms of fundamental freedoms of world prisoners we need to invent Guantanamo we need to invent spaces of exception everywhere and that of course instead of transforming towards a more civilized and in thought in terms of emancipatory feelings and so on the structure of international relations it brings it down to a more uncivilized and less universal positions where the exception become the norm and where whenever we adopt the jargon of war we are actually talking about tyrant keys and we are in fact talking about the suspension of democracy and so saying that something we are at war you know it means hey baby we are on a special mission here shut up and that closes spaces of democracy or at least pluralism of democracy and suspense with implications at least for a certain period but how long is that period and with what limits suspense fundamental guarantees that exist in democratic orders and where do you see the role of the media of kind of given this rhetoric the megaphone and then no one kind of it becomes difficult to have this pluralism and democracy in a certain way that we see them the media is kind of wide open to the state's rhetoric most of the time well absolutely I mean actually the media are you know a part of the problem the solution in the sense that they offer a way of checking a way of triangulating news we know way much more about you know criminal behaviors and and therefore the public opinion leaves on the existence of media and social media and at the same time much of those mechanisms many of those mechanisms are about sensationalism and that about what some has been defining meta-terrorism the idea that facing with a terror attack in the past few years what we see on the media instead of having I don't know as a pundit or as an expert sociologist of visual culture that explains how terrorists communicate and puts things under an interpretive frame and allows to understand what is the message and how the message is built and therefore to deconstruct that and to allow the wider public to understand what is the stake in that message why they use why ISIS uses Hollywood post-production techniques what we get is some generals who just talk about from that episode how we might be exposed to a next biological nuclear attack and therefore everything is about the speculation of future apocalyptic scenarios that creates a kind of broad anxiety which lays the ground for militarized answers to come and the problem with that is that this is linked and this is a very important problem you know if what they said is that by the end of the Cold War it was an attempt to bring security to a reconceptualization in terms of human security the security of individuals not so much security in terms of control of territory but in terms of people and in terms of what societies are about the fact that securing the state doesn't mean making the people more secure sometimes actually it's the opposite well what we observe today we are entering a post-human society where security practices are to be developed in a condition of risk and we use algorithmic mechanisms that is we need to act in a condition of uncertainty not when we have evidence but we don't have evidence and that means we create machine learning mechanisms machines that are able to digest everybody's data to create a sense, a statistic sense of what is normal understand what is the deviance and therefore those who think well I have nothing to hide you know I can put all of my data out in the public in fact they're feeding the machine they're feeding the monster which allows to single out in a post-human mechanism who the enemy is and those mechanisms of militarization make no mistake there the machine means that nobody has political responsibility so it's a way of depoliticizing the mechanism we are playing with fire, we are playing with fundamental freedoms a fake positive might have huge implication for an entire society yeah and on this point of how also when people try to expose these things like for example just to mention few like Junior Assange or Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning and there are a lot of others they kind of also being labeled as traitors of the state so in the end as you said the truth becomes obscure, no one is in charge, no one is responsible so you don't know who to refer to or to put in or to persecute or to say okay that's what's the mistake we need to correct it and this with automated decision making makes it more problematic because it's not everybody who understands even the ones who are developing these procedures they don't understand how they work so in the sense it's very messy kind most human Mohamed means that when you are at the border crossing a border and someone checks your document it's just a flag coming from a computer due to what the fact that someone might have called you and it's completely imprescrutable, you don't know what is the chain of responsibility behind you being black listed or white listed and maybe a donation to a child in Gaza and then you end up with some black mechanism because some software that checks everybody's reliability in terms of banking produces some knowledge about you that you don't have access to you can't resort to any judicial power to undo that what you said rightly by pointing to the case of Assange and so on let's think about one single fact let me take it a bit long but I think it's very important one critical aspect about security is not only what security is and whose security is to provide security but also how is security to be achieved, there are different answers in history and in terms of social sciences traditionally it's about diplomacy and the military, in terms of state national security and so on, then it became way more articulated with liberal thinking in terms of, no it's trade it's trade and democracy, that's the liberal piece, now another corner of that is that which is corrective vis-à-vis the others or might be a different paradigm is it's about participatory mechanisms, it's about a solidaristic understanding of society to society dialogue, that is very important for the demise of the Cold War peace building as a subversive practice in the 80s, pacifist movements and security out of the involvement and the active mobilization of citizens a transborder mobilization, now what we see with Assange and other cases like that is in fact that it is technically possible to come to denounce episodes of great violations, systematic violation of human rights which are definitely not in the interest of the West among others in the sense of maintaining a certain consistency and the strong ideological appeal, a way of convincing that it's better to go to intervene for a good cause than not, so even from that point of view the fact that there are mechanisms denouncing abuse should be important and yet what we observe is that Assange is in prison and none of the war crimes that his organization has denounced have been persecuted and that's the paradox there's a big fail there one might discuss and there might be points to say that Assange has exposed this and that and this is always a problem of ethically speaking it's about an ethics of conviction, I'm using Max Weber here I'm doing something because it's right or an ethics of consequences I'm doing something because it will have certain consequences and it's about responsibility there might be arguments for either and for both but the fact that nobody is paying for crimes that have been denounced that are so clear private corporations military corporations shooting on harmless civilians just for the sake of it well that is a cry of indignation that is there open in the open so yeah for instance like the invasion of Iraq till now George Bush and Tony Blair are still kind of free doing whatever they want without being kind of at least persecuted because of the war crimes that they were committed that's crucial, that's crucial we have been discussing for years about terrorism and terrorism became so pervasive and attacking Europe and and the Bapaklan and so on but if you pay attention it's very difficult in a public debate to say you know it all started with the invasion of Iraq that's set into motion a chain of activities that destabilize Syria by sending foreign fighters back and forth the borders and Al Qaeda became the Islamic State in the middle of that in the middle of that invasion going back to claiming responsibility, political and moral and even judicial responsibility for the invasion of Iraq as a turning point based on lies it's something that is difficult to say on a public debate people say oh come on we are going back to that primal scene but this primal scene is crucial it has been setting the entire Middle East into flame and the domino effect that should have been democracy is what we see today of having a ring of friends and democratic leaders we have a ring of autocrats and dictators and human rights and trumpeted and destroyed everyone yeah so in principle it's the idea of justice of having justice and not just saying okay now I always have the feeling that understanding of time and historical events and how they are interconnected is being also kind of corrupted and we don't kind of take it seriously but I would like now to move a bit more into also knowing that you are working also on the Sahel and duration how the security interventions by for instance France is also destabilizing the region so can you elaborate more on what's the situation there in the Sahel and how this military interventions keep on feeding this insecurity well the Sahel is a hard topic and it's very topical in fact because much of the mobilization for projection of security apparatuses in Europe now is about the Sahel and the kind of widespread rhetoric is that the Sahel is a threat for European security Le Drian France minister for the first repeated that in the last couple of days well let's start from some evidence there is no single attack coming from the Sahel to European inside European borders so far that might be changing of course in the future but for much emphasis on how the Sahel is the underbelly of a destabilization chain there's no evidence so far what there is evidence about is that after 9 11 attention came to this region because of a number of tourists being kidnapped and the very name of Sahel as the kind of semi-arid strip of land just south of the Sahara desert you know wasn't part of the self perception of people up to very recent times we are talking about an area extremely poor some of the poorest countries in the world that in the past few years made major investments in the security apparatus four times as many as much as before as opposed to development goals and that has been done with the assistance of the west and the assistance of Europe and other countries and we are talking about an area that is now part of global competition between key international players the US is somehow back into the picture of the Trump Russia is very much assertive in the other area from Central Africa Republic to events in Chad Russia being accused of mercenaries to have provided weapons to rebels and behind the killing of the president of Chad, a dictator that was very close to France China being very present in European Union countries deploying special forces through the Takuba task force United Nations there with a number of international stabilization missions everybody's there right now in a big mess by the way there's a big problem of coordination among local collectors with international collectors and we're talking about a very poor region that came on the spotlight after 9-11 let's say with the US for the first time calling for a trans-Saharan counter-terror initiative at that point it was clear there were terrorists there so what one can say and it's not so much of a provocation there's groundings for saying that that's counter-terror before or after the appearance of terror because at that point sure there was a potential for civil war in Algeria its own spillover onto the southern region but for example the transformation of the Algerian Salafist Islamic group into al-Qaeda is after that it's from 2006-2007 after 9-11 so the first question is when we talk about terror and counter-terror we sometimes think what comes first who calls the shots for the other there's clearly an interaction there between deployments and what happens locally in extremely fragile context where the idea of the state or modern state is very recent we're talking about in northern Mali the first modern school was opened there 100 years ago before there there were different forms of society and polities very much linked to semi-nomadic forms of circulation which didn't consider borders the way we understand them as a line in the sand but as a matter of societal relations and imposing the idea that security is about more borders and less circulation curfews electrified fences drones controlling people it has a huge impact it's having a huge impact on the way people live because you don't live in the desert if you don't move the desert is a space of circulation so if you start saying migrants across there because they all come to Europe it's not true it's about 20-30% to try to reach Europe many others are part of circular migrations and therefore of the local economy and putting fences everywhere as President Trump used to say why don't you build a big sand wall like we did with Mexico as if that would solve the security problems in Europe well that's precisely the problem we're talking about an extremely fragile area not only al-Qaeda but also the Islamic state have become extremely active they even fight against one another to see who's leading the insurgency and what kind of Islam will prevail what kind of jihadist version of Islam will prevail there are other much broader configurations of political Islam both on the Turkish Muslim brothers Qatar side and on the other countries of the Gulf Saudi Arab Emirati side fighting one another politically entire societies are being transformed by these new forms of attention and it's an extremely poor area undergoing major transformations under the challenge of climate crisis because that's where you feel climate change happening already in terms of desertification in terms of variability so a big problem that is tackled only through security lenses we should welcome the fact that the European Union after some difficult start has just published a new strategy which brings to the center the problem of governance who's governing those countries are local governments part of the problem or the solution what is the relation between corruption clientelism, patronage and the fact that people can't bear it, can't take it anymore and you know they go for the bush and the young population goes for the jihadist in many areas when you mentioned the EU is having this strategy so I'm wondering like how what legitimized this intervention from the EU or from other states so when they intervene there and when they say we have a plan is it just kind of trying to confront the colonial legacy to make things better so where's the local agency of the people saying okay we don't want this because I don't want to switch to another region because maybe if you want to elaborate and then we can quickly switch because we're almost running out of time unfortunately okay so the colonial question is important the post-colonial dimension in understanding security is extremely important here when we talk about colonial power we talk mainly about France but also Italy as much as Libya is concerned and the Great Britain in terms of the other Anglophone areas of West Africa but it's important because it's a kind of semi-hidden dimension here which is exploited very much like Turkey that is having a very assertive line in Africa right now Turkey saying you know we are an anti-colonial part of the anti-colonial decolonization struggle Turkey that was there as part of the Ottoman Empire by the way so I mean it's not colonial but it's imperial or imperialist if you like and the same goes with China and the same goes with a number of other forces that are moving behind the seat now what your point is important because it's actually the local states the local leaders who called in external partners but who are they so in the case of Mali which started the entire problem I mean we are talking about an implosion of the state a rebellion in the north the state melting a coup d'etat we had the second one last year and the second coup d'etat was actually organized by military that the European Union was training had been training so there is a bit of a problem there as a matter of fact what kind of training and how loyal are they to the principle of democratic governance and so on so yes there is an invitation which is part of a legal framework formally speaking but we are talking about extremely weak governments that are flagging the need or the interest in being beneficiaries of counter-terror aid since the development aid is shrinking so we have a big terrorist problem and it is not that there is no insurgency there we have a major insurgency by now it says Boko Ram and you have the Islamic State the Greater Sahara and you have Al-Qaeda creating an umbrella organization and we have other formations fighting if you look at the data it's a clear escalation throughout the entire region Vodik Burkina, Niger, Mali and further afield but what is important is how this partnership is structured which is is there a transformative agenda there and that's what has been missing so far there's been an agenda looking at for example how the European Union has been diverting the EU trust fund for Africa from being a broad program on to mainly being captured by the fear of migrations not being contained and what happened in the past few years and hopefully is changing now the European Union has opened for example its new strategy to contribution from anyone and that's a good a welcome development first time it happened what is important is that those civil society organizations that in the past up to 10 years ago were considered the best allies of the European Union as a transformative power as a power being born beyond geopolitics as a way of proposing a different idea of peace that was not just the classical idea of absence of war and real politic and the raison d'etat well what happened in the past 10 years due to this fear of migrations especially has been that those NGOs and civil society became the worst enemies they became hostile to the European Union and at the same time the local leaders were paying lip service by saying our main problem is terrorism our main problem is migration it's not the main problem is that no running water the main problem is no schooling all schools are closed due to insurgency in those areas there's an entire generation born and growing illiterate only under jihadist teaching and that's a huge problem for the future this this approach kind of reminds me also what's happening in Lebanon so how the ruling or structures are alluding with the asking for benefits from the outside but also eliminating any possible or trying to eliminate any possible transformation within the society so when I hear one example is what happened last year after the 4th of August in Beirut the French president went there and then he brought everybody together and said you have to put your act together and try to fix it but in the sense he kind of continuing this idea of stability that the European Union wants to have in the region but there are parties and recent parties for example citizens within a state who are having ideas and plans to transform society but are kind of being sidelined major or the international community so that they maintain this idea of stability so can you quickly maybe running out of time to elaborate on this what do they mean by the idea of stability is it just for their own benefits just to have markets and the flow of capital let me answer philosophically here our understanding of security is very much tilted toward this idea of stability as if there was chaos there out there pre-existing our act of knowing it and speaking it so the idea which is very much from Hobbes is that the only way out of that instability this kind of state of nature and chaos is by alienating our freedom our agency onto a third overimposed element that is the sovereign, the Leviathan in Hobbes terms by adopting that philosophy we rule out that security can be born out of solidarity and cooperation among individuals and organizations and people and actors so if we choose that line the idea that the only form of security well then we have like I said the idea that the peace can be the peace of the graveyard peace can be the Pax Mafiosa whereas if we adopt a different critical understanding of security as a transformative process that can be normatively inclined towards liberation politics towards liberating human potential then we get the different answer I'm not saying that there's no need for acknowledging the fact that there are power configurations, there are ruling classes and they are kleptocratic and that we need to engage them but are we engaging them for a purpose or are we engaging them for the sake of putting things down that's a dilemma for the European Union is there a way of injecting the transformative element in our understanding of security now let me conclude on that if you go back to the writings about security in the 16th and 15th and 17th century you basically get two understandings one is security as a preservation of integrity from external aggression the classical idea of safety physical safety and so on and the other understanding is security used in a more negative connotation the idea of security as someone's misplaced overconfidence, careless overconfidence, complacency about you know feeling well I am beyond out I am here to stay and Shakespeare or Edmund Berg, Shakespeare even wrote in Macbeth, security is mortal's chief enemy when you feel too secure you don't understand the challenges of change well that's a mortal definition of security and it has disappeared in history as our understanding of security but I believe it's very important to understand that it is a contested meaning and we need to keep it open for definition because you know overconfident understanding of security means that the European Union and ourselves line on the wrong side of history that sounds really great thank you thank you Professor Schatzari for joining us and we hope that the audience also found this interesting and enjoyed it in the next session thank you very much and have a good conference bye bye