The ongoing digitalisation of our lives has been greatly accelerated during the pandemic. While it provides solutions to challenges of our times and has become part of EU states’ response to the pandemic, the risks and threats to fundamental rights, such as privacy and protection from discrimination are there and cannot be overlooked.
The podcast features the 6th workshop of the series Security and the Left in Europe, Towards New Left Concepts of Security, facilitated by transform! europe and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s Brussels Office. The series aims to foster an intersectional and transnational discussion on peace and security through the lens of today’s challenges and movements (feminist, anti-racist, ecological, human rights, and peace movements).
In this framework, activists, scholars, and members of left parties exchange ideas on how security is discussed in different regions of Europe and share their perspective on what security means in relation to these challenges and movements. The workshops facilitate continuous dialogue that has already resulted in an ePublication with considerations and further questions for a left concept of ‘security’.
The podcast was released as part of Women on Air: Global Dialogues at Radio Orange (Austria), a series on women’s movements worldwide, feminist and transcultural debates, development policies, women’s work and life realities as well as global power relations.
This workshop’s main questions include:
- Debates on privacy, whose privacy are we talking about? Whose security is taken into account and whose is not?
- How do we counteract the trend in which mass surveillance is being continuously expanded in the name of security?
- What are the counter-strategies to mobilise the public against mass surveillance?
- Repeatedly, organised crime and terrorism have been instrumentalised to justify mass surveillance plans. How can we counter organised crime without jeopardising the privacy and fundamental rights of the many?
Speakers:
- Kateřina Konečná, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM, Czechia), Member of the European Parliament (The Left) and since October 2021 chairwomen of the KSČM,
- Ella Jakubowska, Policy Advisor, European Digital Rights (EDRi), Brussels
- Simona Levi, Activist and Trainer, Xnet, Spain