The Making of Europe’s Critical Infrastructure

Our new edited volume, “The Making of Europe’s Critical Infrastructure: Common Connections and Shared Vulnerabilities“, was recently published, see the publisher’s website. It’s the main outcome of a major European project, Europe Goes Critical: The Emergence and Governance of Transnational European Infrastructures (EUROCRIT), which started in 2007 and now comes to its end. EUROCRIT was in turn part of the ESF programme Inventing Europe.  The book features some intriguing stories not only from Western Europe, but also from less well-known (in the history of science, technology and environment) European lands such as Bulgaria, Greece, and the European-Asian borderlands in Russia. A major theme is East-West relations in infrastructures, especially energy systems. On a more theoretical level, we explore in this volume the connections between the history of large technical systems and the more STS-oriented concepts of risk and vulnerability. Contributors, apart from myself, include Anique Hommels, Arne Kaijser, Erik van der Vleuten, Anna Åberg, Vincent Lagendijk, Karl-Erik Michelsen, Ivan Tchalakov, Tihomir Mitev, Ivaylo Hristov, Aristotle Tympas, Stathis Arapostathis, Katerina Vlantoni, Yiannis Garyfallos, Lars Heide, Lars Thue, and Eefje Cleophas – representing eight research groups in seven countries.