INDIGO is a project on pressing issues affecting the future of democratic governance in Europe and the relation between the individual and the public sphere. INDIGO undertakes a structured analysis and develops an innovative approach to analysing and addressing the impact of digitalisation of the multi-jurisdictional implementation of policies in Europe through joint information systems and the use of advanced machine learning systems based on algorithms on possibilities of steering of decision-making by democratic legislation, individual participation, the protection of fundamental rights and the enforcement of the rule of law through independent judicial review. The objectives and outcome are, first, to map the profoundly transformative impact of innovative information technologies on rule-making and decision-making procedures and their impact on constitutional values enshrined in EU public law. Second, to develop future-proof regulatory approaches to realising these values in an age of technological innovation. INDIGO will thereby develop pathways to ensure that the use of information technology will both enhance the rule of law, democracy, transparency and the protection of fundamental individual rights as well as efficiency in problem solving and provision of public goods. INDIGO cuts across themes 3, 4 and 5 having as subjects inter alia democracy and information, expertise and the locus of engagement influencing public decision-making and questions of the nature of their authority and accountability. The consortium will closely work together in working groups with legal scholars, STS social scientists and Computer Science experts, led as PI by the originator and coordinator of the ReNEUAL project.

SepaRope is the first empirically-grounded and comparative project rethinking the theory and practices of Separation of powers in present-day European Union. It addresses the very core of ‘democratic governance in a turbulent age’ and connects to all themes of the call. Separation of powers, the classic model of decision-making, entrusts different state functions to different branches (legislative, executive, judiciary) and serves the double purpose of ensuring collective will-formation and control of those in power. The polyarchic multilevel nature of the EU is not easily reconciled with the separation-of-powers-model, either at EU or national level. SepaRope demonstrates in combined horizontal and vertical inquiries how recent economic and political developments affect the EU’s institutional framework and the anchoring of EU decision-making in national legitimacy. It combines conceptual constitutional analysis with empirical research in three fields (Economic and Monetary Union, migration, trade), in which EU decision-making is controversial, rights-sensitive and illustrative of recent power shifts. Working package 1 develops a joint conceptual framework for identifying and examining will-formation and control structures. WP2-4 conduct autonomous but interlinked empirical and legal-analytical studies of the three branches in the three policy fields, respectively, exposing ever-increasing ‘grey areas’ of diffuse, ring-fenced, and informalised public power. WP2-4 demonstrate the three branches’ mutually constitutive nature and contingency of power shifts. WP5 makes concrete innovative and practically viable suggestions to EU and national institutional actors on how will-formation and control structures can be strengthened in the polyarchic multilevel EU. Stakeholders are involved as interviewees and participants.

The CrimScapes project explores the expanding application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as both responses to, and producers of, the politics of threat and uncertainty that are currently expanding across the European region. Given the inherent tensions between democratic processes and ever-expanding legal regulations, the project investigates this growing reliance on criminal technologies and institutions as a challenge to the participatory nature of democratic societies, and as possible symptoms and causes of the general sense of turbulence that has come to dominate much of economic, social and political life. It works to analytically grasp the motivations behind, and challenges and implications of, criminalisation for the variety of actors and practices that (re-)shape entangled crimscapes - i.e. landscapes of criminalisation. With the support of secondary literature, archival research and interviews, project members will develop - for a variety of publics - CrimeLines (i.e. genealogical timelines) of seven European crimscapes (of drug use, migration, sex work, surrogacy, the prison context, LGBT identities, and hate speech). Additional ethnographic fieldwork will help to conceptualise - in publications and an EthnoGraphic Novel - the strategies, relations and citizenship dynamics of the implicated actors as they navigate democratic participation and freedoms with legal regulation and measures of crime control. Extracting from this empirical data, researchers will then highlight and open for discussion - with policy makers and other stakeholders - documented dilemmas of democratic governance so as to enhance the lived realities, rights-claims and desired futures of all implicated actors.

SepaRope is the first empirically-grounded and comparative project rethinking the theory and practices of Separation of powers in present-day European Union. It addresses the very core of ‘democratic governance in a turbulent age’ and connects to all themes of the call. Separation of powers, the classic model of decision-making, entrusts different state functions to different branches (legislative, executive, judiciary) and serves the double purpose of ensuring collective will-formation and control of those in power. The polyarchic multilevel nature of the EU is not easily reconciled with the separation-of-powers-model, either at EU or national level. SepaRope demonstrates in combined horizontal and vertical inquiries how recent economic and political developments affect the EU’s institutional framework and the anchoring of EU decision-making in national legitimacy. It combines conceptual constitutional analysis with empirical research in three fields (Economic and Monetary Union, migration, trade), in which EU decision-making is controversial, rights-sensitive and illustrative of recent power shifts. Working package 1 develops a joint conceptual framework for identifying and examining will-formation and control structures. WP2-4 conduct autonomous but interlinked empirical and legal-analytical studies of the three branches in the three policy fields, respectively, exposing ever-increasing ‘grey areas’ of diffuse, ring-fenced, and informalised public power. WP2-4 demonstrate the three branches’ mutually constitutive nature and contingency of power shifts. WP5 makes concrete innovative and practically viable suggestions to EU and national institutional actors on how will-formation and control structures can be strengthened in the polyarchic multilevel EU. Stakeholders are involved as interviewees and participants.

Since the Euro-crisis, the benign European self-image of unity in diversity cedes in the face of a new South-North divide, in which different layers of the past are evoked to explain the division and justify actions. The reasonings mix historical facts with normative, moralistic claims. At their centre is a concept of debt. The core question is: what impact does the invocation of a past debt have on the relation between two (collective) subjects in the present? The question will be answered by selected analyses of debt in narratives about the European past. Invocations of debt have a performative potential and intend to direct action, claiming that a historical debt relation entails rights and responsabilities in the present. This project links questions of historiography with concerns in political philosophy and addresses squarely the issue of the connection between past and present as posed in the arts and in historical sociology. Thus, it adds considerably to common research on uses of the past that often merely shows the pasts constructability. Scholarly debate has done little, in the newly divided Europe, to make different view-points intelligible to others. The research will demonstrate how performative invocation of past debt has an impact on the present, but also how a historically insensitive accounting view of debt can provoke guilt-oriented reconstructions of the past as a counter-measure. It aims at a more responsible use of the past in the present. To achieve its objectives, the proposed project links four major centres of research in the humanities with widely known cultural institutions in Athens, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Helsinki and Turin and develops an inter-disciplinary and multi-perspectival approach drawing both on the competences and the experiences of its researchers, who come from both North and South of Europe and are often intra-European migrants.