In the wake of the defining 9/11 landmark of international security and terror attacks on European cities, Europe has become increasingly engaged in strengthening its counter-terrorism policies (Argomaniz 2009; Argomaniz, Bures, and Kaunert 2014; European Council, 2017). This as part of a wider notion of European security evidenced by the European Agenda on Security (EAS), into which universities have now been explicitly drawn (EAS 2015). European universities are then increasingly significant institutions in a securitized Europe (Davies and Gustafson, 2013; de Graaff, 2017). Yet the historic and contemporary relationship of European universities to security runs deeper and wider than current counter-terrorist measures. Not only have universities been and continue to be major sources of recruitment for the security and intelligence services in Europe and the United States, and a reservoir of secret as well as open source knowledge and or (security-sensitive) information, universities have also been integral to the origins and formation of the leading security and intelligence agencies themselves (Aldrich, 2010; Andrew, 2010; de Graff 2016; Jeffery 2011; Weiner, 2012).

   Western security and intelligence agencies have also helped shaped significant emergent disciplines in the Academy such as security and intelligence studies, and have an historic and current, near all-encompassing outreach into a multitude of fields across the arts, humanities and social sciences as well across all domains of medical, scientific and technological research (Author 2015; 2017; 2017a; 2018; Sinclair 1989; Winks 1987). The emergent ‘disciplines’ of intelligence collection, knowledge gathering, generation and dissemination, the very aims and purposes of universities are themselves increasingly critical to security and intelligence processes (Lowenthal and Clark, 2015). Universities have long been then the physical and intellectual space where academic endeavour meets security and intelligence agency, where, that is, two types of intelligence agency have long met in the physical and intellectual space of the European university. Much of this has been under-researched because of the covert operational nature of the security and intelligence agencies themselves, though of late some limited light has been thrown upon such engagements (Author, 2015; 2017; 2017a). Beyond educational research there have been substantial UK research council investments into security (Tilley, Bouhana and Braithwaite 2014), including major Research Councils UK funding for their Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF, 2017). There are also increasingly embedded cross-European security research projects which are the result of substantial collaborations across disciplines with a range of security and intelligence agencies (Technopolis, 2015).

   Today, in large measure through greater involvement of European universities in counter-terrorism provisions of governments across the continent, such processes are intensified and intensifying. Yet the securitization of European universities and European educational research is only in part driven by such counter-terrorism agendas. The latter have simply highlighted patterns of securitization long since observed by theorists of security studies (Albert and Buzan, 2011;  Buzan and Hansen 2009; Dunn Cavelty and Mauer 2012; Durodie 2016; Glees 2016; Huysmans, 1998; Johnson 2012; Laustsen and Wæver 2000).

   Conscious of post-Brexit and other geo-political threats to Europeanisation, this paper has three interrelated foci: (1) Europeanization and Securitization; (2) Securitisation Theory and the Securitized University: A Contextual and Theoretical Framing; (3) Educational Research in a Securitized Europe. The first section demonstrates a link between Europeanization and securitization and shows the processes which have inexorably drawn universities into a critical institutional and operational security role. The second section draws on securitization theory to conceptualise a three-fold – disciplinary-epistemological, institutional, and operational – analytic-structural model to frame a nascent notion of the ‘securitized university’. Having established a theoretical bridgehead between Europeanisation and securitisation, the third section outlines the critical implications for educational research in a securitized Europe.

This paper is theoretical and draws on methods and sources the author used for a major (now published) review of terrorism and counter-terrorism in UK universities, widened here to provide analysis of the European Agenda on Security (EAS) and European Universities and in particular a three-fold – disciplinary-epistemological, institutional, and operational – analytic-structural model to frame a nascent notion of the ‘securitized university’. Along with a comprehensive amount of empirical data of casualties and other tragic consequences of terrorism worldwide, the literature on terrorism and counter-terrorism is diverse, is growing and is within the Academy arguably uniquely multi-disciplinary. With published peer-review material across in excess of one hundred journals (Tinnes 2013), with a plethora of general, popular or trade literature (Sinai 2012), an inundation of media reporting and social media exchanges resulting in a perplexing range of narrative and counter-narratives (Christou, Croft, Ceccorulli and Lucarelli 2010; Glazzard 2017), terrorism and counter-terrorism research is also located in a multitudinous range of burgeoning sites, including research centres, institutes as well as governmental, inter-governmental and independent policy-related think-tanks (Freedman 2010). This complexity is compounded by shifting legislative contexts in different national and geopolitical regions and set against changing terrorist and counter-terrorist political and other agendas. This paper aims to bring some conceptual-theoretical harnessing for what one theorist has called ‘an unruly field’, itself requiring ‘disciplining’ (Stampnitzky 2011). In order to review the literature and related key research sources, a key word search using standard academic Google Scholar engines using combinations of the following terms (the paper’s key words): ‘security’, ‘securitization’, ‘terrorism’, ‘counter-terrorism’, and ‘European universities’. It used the institutional sites located across Europe and internationally to snowball the institutional contextual search of policy and research impacts against the backdrop of international developments.

For European universities a structural-analytic review of the identified research and policy literature within and beyond the field of educational research itself has shown a progressive permeation of security agendas motivated ostensibly by terrorist actions and ideologies (Author 2018). These have been shown such securitising moves have impacted on three interrelated levels: disciplinary-epistemological, institutional, and operational. The disciplinary-epistemological category is identifies with knowledge production and dissemination, including a multi-disciplinary flourish of research on terrorism and counter-terrorism (Silke and Schmidt-Petersen 2017). The institutional category identifies two major impacts: firstly on the institutional level of universities themselves with policy responsibilities for ensuring campus safety and secondly, in terms of legislative responsibilities of universities as institutions through their wider societal role in counter terrorism in the light of European-wide counter-terrorism and security measures (EAS 2015).The author writes from a UK perspective such European developments are evidenced in the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (CTSA 2015). The operational category is less explored and much less understand and identifies the interactions not only between police and related law enforcement officers but security and intelligence agencies, a source of much contention in universities (Dylan and Alexander 2012; Glees 2015; Durodie 2016) but it is an operational relationship which the wider literature show to have been historically covert (Sinclair1986; Winks 1987; Witanek 1989; Zwerling 2011). For the educational researchers the situatedness of her endeavours is and will long remain in this wider geopolitical context. Beyond counter-terrorism contexts, it is a context which is reflective of a now entrenched blend of disciplinary-epistemological, institutional, and operation categories just outlined, as much as it is integral to the operating culture of European intelligence communities themselves (de Graff and Nyce 2016).

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