Scientific Committee | Memory | Youth | Secretariat | Communication & Information
| SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE |  |
The Scientific Committee of FLARE has the objective of gathering university teachers and experts in matters tied to organized crime who, thanks to their cultural relevance and their competence, will be able to orient the activities of the Network and provide important chances of cultural growth for the Network itself.
The activities of the Committee are:
1. To gather, review and catalogue materials (books, essays, documentary films, websites) on organized crime, at an international level, in order to create a virtual library on the matter. This library will be included in the web portal and will form the training basis for the Network members and for all those who may be interested in studying such matters. It would in fact be the first thematic multi-source virtual library on the Net. Besides, it will be the source where to get materials for the preparation of the future activities of the Network.
2. To collaborate in the creation of an observatory on organized crime. In fact, starting from the press reviews collected by the members (see also Communication), the Committee will have the task of interpreting the phenomena tied to organized crime in an international context. Unlike the virtual library, the observatory will be the instrument for addressing the research and monitoring the results. This will allow the Network to have an information basis, necessary in order to be able to propose focused actions.
3. To organize a publication, edited by the some of the members, that go in-depth in the matters treated by the FLARE Campaigns.
The Scientific Committee is formed by:
Ms Monica Massari (Coordinator) Sociologist, researcher. Expert in organized crime, eco-crimes, human trafficking. Researcher at the University of Calabria, Italy. Member of the Executive Committee of the ECPR/SGOC (Standing Group on Organised Crime).
Mr Sergio Andreis (Coordinator) Member of the Board of the Association Lunaria. Former Deputy at the Italian Parliament.
Mr Bruno Amoroso, Fellow Professor of International and Development Economy at the University of Roskilde, Denmark.
Nando Dalla Chiesa. Writer and politician, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan, Italy. Former MEP.
Mrs Loretta Napoleoni. Economist, expert on financing of terrorism. Chairman of the counter-terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid.
Ms Adriana Rossi. Expert in corruption and international policies. Researcher at the University of Rosario, Argentina.
Mr Vincenzo Ruggiero. Professor of Sociology, Co-Director of the Crime and Conflict Research Centre, University of Middlesex, UK.
Mrs Dina Siegel. President of the IASOC (International Association for the Study of Organized Crime), member of the Board of CIROC (Centre for Information and Research on Organized Crime), Professor of Criminology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Mr Klaus von Lampe. Researcher, expert in smuggling and drug trafficking. Assistant Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, USA.
Mr Tom Blickman. Independent researcher and journalist, member of the Transnational Institute (TNI.) Areas of interest: International Drug Control Policy, Transnational Organised Crime, Global Enforcement Regimes
Particularly, we intend to work on the training of state operators and civil servants, magistrates, attorneys and local authorities, in order to make the contrast to organized crime as effective as possible, starting from the Italian and European experiences.
We also intend to work on the construction of legislative packages, suitable to attack the assets of criminal organizations, especially in the matter of confiscation of property and their reuse for social purposes.
We intend to stimulate the growth of the attention of civil societies concerning the theme of fight against organized crime, and to create bridges between states and civil society, necessary for an effective action of control and contrast.
The work of this department is mainly centred upon the creation and realization of exchanges of good practices between governments, magistratures and civil societies, in order to try and build, in all different realities, the most effective systems for the contrast to organized crime.
| MEMORY | |
General objectives
First of all, we want to find a group of witnesses coming from various European Countries, in order to make the effort of informing on the theme more effective: to tell the story of a person, with a name and a face, is decisive when you want to focus the fact that organized crime exists, and operates in a context made of real people, heavily influencing their lives. They may be journalists which freedom of expression and investigation was denied, or politicians, law enforcement officers, migrants, illegal workers, or more generally common people or their relatives, who found themselves living abuses of power or violations of their rights in first persons, due to unfair and criminal logics.
The instruments used to spread these stories could be testimonies, interviews, videos, public meetings and other initiatives able to convey both the humanity and the extreme seriousness of such stories. Another objective of the Memory team is to implement – in the long run – an organized network of victims, able on one side to stimulate a mechanism of reciprocal support based upon trust and the awareness of not being alone, on the other side to give the visibility and strength necessary to make pressure on institutions and civil society, in order to obtain a recognition both formal and socio-cultural of the status of victim.
Steps
The first step to take will be to identify about 20 stories which could be potentially interesting for FLARE, through web searches, the contacts with Reporters sans Frontières, Libera, the Study Centre of Gruppo Abele, Transparency International, and the FLARE member associations.
The second step will be to choose 7-8 cases to centre our attention upon. The third step will be to perform an in-depth investigation on each story, in order to ascertain its truthfulness and the availability of the relatives of the victims, or the victims themselves. The fourth and last step will be the direct contact with the victims – or relatives – and the beginning of the work of telling the stories and networking the subjects.
| YOUTH | |
General objectives
1. Elaboration of projects complying with the calls for proposals issued by the institutions, particularly European, in order to give the financial and formative basis for the activities of the Network;
2. identification and contact of new members of the Network, especially in the Countries of the “old Europe” and the Mediterranean, currently not much represented in the Network.
Instruments
1. Promotion/participation in international youth exchanges;
2. European Voluntary Service;
3. Organizations of the Assemblies of the Associates of the Network;
4. Organization/participation in training seminars, conferences and international events on organized crime;
5. Networking
Planning
For the first bimester – September-October – 4 actions have been identified which activities, in case of positive outcome of the funding requests, will start in Spring 2009:
1. EVS, European Voluntary Service. Some people coming from FLARE member organizations will be able to take part in an EVS project in Turin, concretely committing themselves in the activities of the Network, such as press reviewing, research, website management.
2. YIA, Youth in Action: action 1.1, Youth exchanges. Deadline: November 1st for projects to be held between February and July 2009. Project: March 21st 2009, an example of active citizenship. Locations: Naples and Turin, Italy. Promoter: FLARE. Budget: € 20,000.
3. YIA, Youth in Action: action 4.3, Training. Deadline: November 1st (as above). Project: Eco-sustainability and eco-crimes. Location: Turin, Italy. Promoter: Terra del Fuoco. Budget: € 10,000. 4. EC-EYF, European Youth Fundation. Category A. deadline: october 1st for projects to be held between April and December 2009. Project: Seminar on the relationships between media and organized crime. Location: Turin, Italy. Period: June 2009. Promoter: FLARE. Budget: € 20,000.
| SECRETARIAT | |
Objectives
1. To assure, in the long run, the economic sustainability of the Network, both by raising funds on behalf of all other sectors to support the projects and activities, and raising funds for the management and structure costs;
2. To coordinate the fund-raising actions of all operative sectors – requests for contributions, participations in calls for proposals, etc.;
3. To archive and maintain the projectual documentation of the Network and the documentation regarding the members (statutes, registration, etc.).
Actions
1. Systematize the fund raising actions: a) Periodic scouting of the funding opportunities offered by the European institutions; b) Periodic distribution to the operative sectors of the deadline reminders and the information for the funding opportunities which may interest any given sector; c) Collection and analysis of the funding sources used by the members of the Network, in the attempt of creating a collection to be used for enlarging the sources for scouting.
2. Support the operative sectors in the participations to calls and presentations of funding requests: 1. Maintentance, in collaboration with the Communication sector, of an updated archive of standard documents – description of the Network, applicant, base prescribed forms (banking ID, financial ID forms, etc.): all in digital format, in order to make it possible to share all documents as well as any correction or update; Creation and maintenance of the archive of requests submitted and projects realized. This will also facilitate the Treasurer in the general management of the Network.
| COMMUNICATION and INFORMATION | |
The Communication team, besides maintaining the relationships with the “external world” and between member organizations of the Network, is responsible for managing the network’s web portal and the online magazine .
The idea of the web portal is to use an unique medium to gather all the FLARE member associations. Every member will be assigned its own web pages, where news and articles concerning criminal activities in the Country of provenance will have to be published. These “posts” will be of different types: articles from newspapers or magazines, either local or national; news taken from reliable websites; etc. The aim is of creating an instrument intended as a continental observatory on certain crime-related matters, through an intense press review made in each of the 30 Countries represented in the Network.
Of course, every member organization of FLARE will also be able to publish news concerning its specific activities, thus reinforcing its presence on the Web. The portal home page – referencing the Netweork as a whole – will show the more interesting and relevant news between those published by each member. The web portal has then the objective of becoming an international observatory on transnational organized crime, giving both the associates and the visitors the possibility to gain a general overview – in a context including Europe and the surrounding areas.
The online magazine will instead be an instrument for elaboration, able to avail itself of the knowledge and professionality of journalists, professors, researchers, politicians and international experts in crime-related themes on a transnational level.
Since some years, the Italian journalistic scene features the specialist monthly Narcomafie. It is a project of information and documentation promoted by the Gruppo Abele. Journalists, university teachers, magistrates, documentation centres from Italy and abroad, groups and associations of civil society collaborate in it. The FLARE Communication team has the intention of “internationalizing” Narcomafie, giving its contents broader borders out of Italy. During the first weeks after the online production of the web portal, it is planned that an informative newsletter is periodically launched – every two or three weeks – addressed to both the FLARE members and a more generalistic target that FLARE wishes to reach. After a few months, when the contents and working methods will be stable, the newsletter contents themselves will form an online magazine, very similar to the web version of Narcomafie. The articles in the FLARE online magazine will come from various sources: enquiries from Narcomafie translated in English, writings provided by the Scientific Committee (see below), articles from international newspapers (translated in English), etc.
Of course, the leitmotif of the online magazine will be transnational organized crime. It will be possible to access the online magazine directly from the home page of the FLARE web portal, which the magazine will be a precious part of, and it will complete its reason to be.
