Security Without Fear: speculative scenarios and policy artifacts for European public governance at PolyFutures conference
We are pleased to share that Bartosz Frąckowiak and Katarzyna Figiel will lead the workshop Security Without Fear at PolyFutures – Reimagining Policymaking for Europe in Brussels.
Security has become one of the dominant languages of public policy. The problem begins when that language starts to spill into everything. Health becomes biosecurity. Communication becomes information warfare. Public space becomes a sensor field. Step by step, more and more areas of life are reorganised around anticipation, control, surveillance, and risk management.
What gets lost in that process is not only privacy or civil liberties, important as they are. Something deeper is also at stake: our political imagination. Once fear becomes the default operating system of governance, it becomes much harder to imagine forms of protection that are not built on suspicion, extraction, profiling, and permanent alert.
That is the starting point of Security Without Fear.
This workshop asks a simple but urgent question: how can we imagine security differently? Not as a technology of anxiety, but as a practice of care, democratic maturity, and collective resilience. Rather than accepting the securitisation of everyday life as inevitable, we want to open up space for other possibilities.
Working at the intersection of foresight, scenario building, and design fiction, participants will explore plausible futures for European public governance up to 2040. But this will not be an exercise in abstract speculation alone. The workshop moves from scenarios toward materialisation: from imagining futures to giving them institutional shape. That may mean prototype regulations, speculative policy artefacts, new models of privacy-preserving infrastructures, or civic formats that redistribute power more fairly across borders and communities.
At Strategic Dreamers, we believe that foresight is most powerful when it does more than describe possible futures. It should also help create the language, images, and tools through which better futures can be negotiated. Security Without Fear is part of that effort: a small intervention against the shrinking horizon of public imagination, and an invitation to think about safety without surrendering freedom, complexity, or democratic depth.