WP4 “Democratisation in conflict-driven contexts” aims at analysing democratisation in a turbulent security environment & explores the consolidation of democratic governance by a state's security institutions; the prevention and neutralisation of anti- and non-democratic policymaking; a democratic resilience building in the context of tensions and societal cleavages.
This project pursues three research tasks:
Task 1: Mapping democratic fragility: Insights into sources of divisions, cleavages, and instability during the democratization and democratic consolidation processes in the 21st century
It aims to make analytical insights into the roots of transitions from non-democratic rule to stable democratic regimes from the security-led perspective, highlighting the sources of instability, divisions, tensions, and overt conflicts within states and societies. By identifying and assessing the impact of factors undermining democratic order and hampering effective democratization, a broad overview of complex security issues will be provided to map the critical points and zoom in on the strongest structural and functional impediments to successful democratization.
Task 2: Unraveling the disruptive performance of anti-democratic actors
It addresses the problem of deliberate delegitimization of democratic governance by the disruptive performance of social and political actors. It will focus on radical, extremist, and subvertive players/performers who exploit new opportunities offered by technological advancements, global IT infrastructure, and cultural transformations. It aims to accentuate the variety of methods, means, and ways that anti-democratic actors utilize for their disruptive performance, creating thereby a serious threat to public security and challenging state institutions responsible for democratic order and internal stability.
Task 3: Building resilient democracies: A security-centred approach
It gives insights into the impact of threats and risks on the stability and performance of democratic governance. It examines resilience building as a critical dimension of democratic robustness and a key process of securitization of democratic order. Resilience will be addressed as an enduring trait of security systems set up in the course of democratization, testing their effectiveness and verifying their level of adaptability to the changing security environment.
His principal interests and research areas include: Euro-Atlantic security; EU intelligence cooperation; and evolution of warfare in the 21st century. He published extensively on these topics. His scholarship contains 11 academic books (four as co-author), editorship of 11 collected volumes (five as a co-editor), and authorship of 100 chapters and 70 articles in Polish, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, and Chinese languages.
He is the author of the monographic book on Intelligence Security in the European Union. Building a Strategic Intelligence Community published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.
He co-edited with Paweł Frankowski two collected volumes: Technology, Ethics and the Protocols of Modern War (Routledge, 2018) and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Regional and Global Security (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Forthcoming is The Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare, co-edited with Sebastian Kaempf (Routledge, 2023).
