Football Crowds, Protestors, and Visions of Transnational (Dis)order on the EU Level

By pulling together debates in the sociology of risk, (in)security and social movement studies concerning how social groups viewed as deviant, potentially “troublesome,” “risky”, or “disorderly” are responded to and defined as “security issues,” this article develops an analysis of EU institutions’ responses to football crowd violence and their expansion into the transnational protest field. The article argues that EU’s involvement in the fields of football crowds and protest is not solely a case of transnational diffusion. What is revealed, from the mid-1990s onwards is a concretization of EU institutions’ securitization of transnationally mobile and potentially “disorderly” social groups operating across European public spaces.