On April 2-3, 2007 the CSIS New European Democracies Project and the CSIS Defense Industrial Initiatives Group (DIIG) hosted a two-day conference entitled Security Threats and Responses: Regional Perspectives, as the first part of the series "Central and East Europe's Security Agenda." The conference focused on pan-European and Transatlantic security priorities, such as the U.S. proposal for missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic; defense industrial base integration and modernization; internal and external challenges to NATO transformation; collaborative EU and NATO strategies toward frozen conflicts in Eastern Europe; and European energy security. The event featured key security experts, political analysts, and officials from the U.S. and Central-East European (CEE) region.

A new in-depth assessment of ‘soft security’ threats in Europe and Eurasia. These threats are now posed by many kinds of trafficking and are being responded to with a range of methods. Experts from around the world are brought together to provide a detailed analysis of the various aspects of trafficking, covering illegal migrants, the black market weapons trade, sex trafficking and drugs. They consider the nature of this threat facing society and the effectiveness of national and international attempts to eradicate it. An assessment of EU responses to ‘soft security’ and a case study of US Homeland Security deliver the latest developments in this key area. Is the concept of ‘soft security’ useful to analysts and policy-makers? Will they be able to manage these sources of insecurity successfully in the future? This work provides likely trends and projections to resolve these pressing questions. This book is a Special Issue of the leading journal European Security.

"In recent years the European Union has taken a range of steps to enhance the way it deals with international crises and natural disasters. In addition to a substantial increase of EU funding, there is closer cooperation between the European Commission, other EU institutions, EU Member States, NGOs and the think tank community in Europe and beyond. New ways of 'making the difference' in terms of crisis response and capacity building have been developed. This new book represents some of the debates conducted during the conference 'Making the difference: Strengthening capacities to respond to crises and security threats' organised by the European Commission on 3 and 4 June 2009 in Brussels. This event is organised every two years and aims at highlighting successful techniques, methods and approaches to conflict transformation, crisis response and peace building. As such, this book is a follow-up to the two previous volumes: 'From early warning to early action? The debate on the enhancement of the EU's Crisis Response capability continues" and 'Faster and more united? The debate about Europe's crisis response capacity'. The new volume brings together photojournalism from the field with background provided by contributions from academia. It includes articles by and interviews with policy experts and crisis response practitioners, making this one of the few witness account-based references on EU crisis response available."--Editor.

Offers an innovate approach to ethics and security, combining securitization theory and the just war tradition.