Green European Journal

The world around us seems increasingly filled with mechanisms to enhance protection and minimise risks yet, paradoxically, the level of fears and anxieties is rising across our societies, with a tendency to fixate on the most sensational, direct, and violent sources of risk. Identifying where the true threats lie is a challenging but crucial enterprise and the Green European Journal contends that progressive forces around Europe need to take the question of security seriously. This edition provides contributions that look beyond today’s politics of fear, towards a politics of hope.

An investigation into the commons reveals the wide-ranging spectrum of definitions and applications of this concept that exist across Europe. Yet from the numerous local initiatives, social movements, and governance models associated with this term – is it possible to identify the outline of a commons-based approach that could form the basis of a broad cross-societal response to the failures of the current system?

This edition of the Green European Journal sets out to identify and apprehend some of the forces of integration and disintegration at work in Europe today.

Borders are back! After 60 years of peace in Europe and the gradual abolition of its internal borders, Europe is now experiencing the full force of the backlash. National borders are once again being heralded as the essential panacea for the multiple crises which have shaken Europe right down to the depths of its foundations. This threatens the hard-won gains of Schengen and of European integration at its very heart.

In response to these developments, the Green European Journal dedicates its 12th volume to new analyses and perspectives on the issue. New thinking on borders for new thinking on Europe!

This edition features a collection of highlights previously published in the Green European Journal, alongside some new pieces. The articles shed light on some of the central dilemmas confronting Europe at the moment – from TTIP to migration, from solidarity to finance – which put considerable strain on the European project, and sometimes seem to threaten its very continuation.