This article investigates the underexplored role of the European External Action Service (EEAS) in the external dimension of EU counterterrorism policy. While formally tasked with enhancing coherence across EU internal and external security domains, the EEAS has struggled to fulfil this mandate due to entrenched intergovernmental rivalries, bureaucratic turf wars, and conflicting priorities between development and security objectives. Drawing on elite interviews, the article traces how overlapping institutional competences, particularly with the European Commission and the EU Counterterrorism Coordinator, have made external communication and internal coordination unnecessarily burdensome, weakening the EU’s ability to present a unified counterterrorism “face” to third countries and international partners. Despite incremental achievements through strategic counterterrorism dialogues, capacity-building efforts, and enhanced information sharing, the EEAS’s institutional positioning in an already crowded EU counterterrorism field remains contested.

The private sector is increasingly playing a significant role in providing open-source intelligence (OSINT) services for European counter-terrorism efforts. Companies such as Maltego, Tech Against Terrorism, and Moonshot have established affiliations at both the supranational and member state levels within the European Union (EU). Their services encompass large-scale aggregation of online data, automated detection of terrorist content, and the identification of emerging narratives associated with radicalization processes. The nature of these affiliations and their impact on security governance in the EU has not yet been examined. The main argument of this research is that OSINT companies are becoming crucial actors in implementing counter-terrorism policy. Alongside public institutions, they co-create security governance. This has significant implications for the accountability, transparency, and validity of counter-terrorism intelligence. The research relies on data from corporate blogs, company websites, and public statements, supplemented by interview data. Case studies of several private companies, headquartered both within and outside the EU, are used to analyze the roles these companies serve as well as how and why they contribute to EU counter-terrorism. By better understanding the presence and functions of private OSINT companies, we can recognize the strengths, limitations, and risks of their involvement in security governance.

This study examines Europol's autonomy in the external dimension of EU security governance through its 2020 Working Arrangement with Kosovo, a third state subject to enlargement policy. In the context of Western Balkan integration and rising hybrid threats like organized crime and terrorism, the study centers on how Europol leverages technical expertise, in the form of SIENA protocols and liaison deployments, to foster cooperation, while at the same time, highlighting accountability deficits by evading robust EU and local oversight. Drawing on agencification scholarship, it examines how depoliticized tools diffuse supranational norms externally, prioritizing operational efficacy over transparency which in turn results in democratic deficit questions.

The research design utilizes a qualitative process-tracing of the Arrangement's text vis-vis operational outcomes. It triangulates Europol annual activity reports (CAARs), EU Kosovo Reports (2020-2024), EDPS decisions, and Kosovo Police records. The key findings highlight significantly increased SIENA exchanges post-2020 that have enabled joint operations and trafficking disruptions, however at the cost of exposing significant accountability gaps, where EDPS audits remain systemic and resource-constrained rather than comprehensive and case-specific. Similarly, the study finds that at the EU level, European Parliament (EP) and JSPG access excludes classified third-country flows and locally, Kosovo's Information and Privacy Agency (IPA) lacks enforcement parity for cross-border data oversight. This highlights significant mandate creep via working arrangements outpacing accountability mechanisms, where efficacy overshadows effective oversight.

The Arrangement exemplifies how EU agencies like Europol exercise significant de facto policy and legal autonomy externally at the cost of skewed oversight favoring internal intergovernmental arrangements over democratic accountability. This in turn amplifies "runaway bureaucracy" risks in AFSJ externalization, effectively undermining enlargement credibility.

This contribution seeks to offer a critical analysis of the evolution, structure and functioning of Eurojust as an alternative model of judicial cooperation to a centralized prosecutor such as the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. The first part of the analysis accounts for the current design of the Eurojust along the supranational-intergovernmental spectrum (Dehousse and Weiler, 1990) based on based on the structure of Eurojust under Article 85 TFEU and the recent Eurojust Regulation. It offers a careful examination of the extent, nature, type and limits of the Eurojust’s powers, particularly in relation to national law enforcement agencies. Within this enquiry, it also examines whether the powers of Eurojust should be expanded and be made binding in order for the agency to effectively satisfy its working tasks. The second part analyses the operating structure and management of the Eurojust attempting to ascertain the extent to which Member States have been capable of maintaining control of the operation over this agency. Conceding that the Member States retain clear possibilities for exercising influence over Eurojust, it contends that the agency over time both in structure and management is developing in a more supranational direction.

This paper looks at (potential) interconnections between accountability in the areas of transnational policing and street-level policing. For transnational policing, the paper has a special focus on EU agencies such as Europol, Frontex and eu-LISA. Both transnational and street-level policing have been under pressure to establish independent accountability settings in light of the far-reaching powers that police agencies exert and of recurrent scandals caused by cases of misconduct.

Both areas can be supposed to have a number of interconnections, for example with street-level policing relying on information stemming from transnational policing. False information in a European Union database such as the Schengen Information System, for example, may lead to an unlawful arrest. People may be kept unlawfully in detention if inaccurate data produces a “false positive” with someone’s biometric data. However, while some accountability settings have been established for both levels, interconnections between them seem to be rare or even inexistent. Theoretically this may be explained with gaps that accountability studies have observed in multilevel systems such as the EU, where multilevel activities in particular tend to escape from effective accountability.

The paper is based on empirical results from a comparative research project (Police Accountability – Towards International Standards). It discusses the fragmented world of complaints bodies, ombuds institutions, data protection agencies and fundamental rights offices that characterise accountability of policing in a multilevel perspective.