CEASEFIRE integrates social science and humanities (SSH) disciplines, which are essential for the successful implementation of the project. More in detail, it integrates some activities into its architecture that are strongly related to SSH, such as law, sociology, international relations, political science, etc. During the first reporting period, the CEASEFIRE research team started working on some of these activities. In particular, in T1.3 it focused on legal, ethical and privacy aspects monitoring, in T1.4 on societal dimension analysis and in WP2 (T2.2 T2.4 and T2.5) on criminological analysis, organisational and operational aspects related to the full establishment of NFFPs, and the trans-border cross-jurisdictional framework harmonisation. All these activities are in progress and they will be completed as per the GA. In all of them, different SSH disciplines have been and will be used in order to reach useful outputs and outcomes.
The SSH disciplines have been also used as a way to inform the technical development of the project’s solutions, as well as the EU’s overall policy-making on firearms trafficking. Through policy, legal and criminological analysis of the state-of-the-art on national and EU policy frameworks and practices, compounded with empirical research, the project gathers social science evidence on the gaps and inconsistencies in investigating firearms trafficking across borders. This entails areas such as data collection and exchange, prosecution, modus operandi and operational challenges, legislative gaps, and the implementation and operation of NFFPs. This policy relevant evidence is crucial both for the project internally, as it informs the technological development of the operational gaps where innovation is most necessary, as well as beyond the scope of the project, as it will instrumentalise the project’s policy recommendations in the aforementioned areas.
