Throughout the last 15 years, individuals and groups demonstrating an attitude of protest have been put on the agenda in Europe. From 2000 on, the number of cases involving extra-parliamentary extreme left-wing actors has increased; these affairs have been the result of a renewed interest for these people on the part of several security agencies. A population has thus been identified and subjected to a particular attention.
This presentation analyses the statements of the European Union’s criminal intelligence agency Europol on extreme left-wing actors. I chose Europol as it is at the centre of the European security policy and because its influence is constantly growing. My corpus is constituted by the eleven editions of the EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report, as it is in these documents that Europol refers to extreme left-wing actors. The question I will aim to answer is: how are European extreme left-wing actors identified by Europol and according to what strategy?
The main argument of the presentation is that Europol’s discourse indicates that there exists a differential treatment of the population defined as close to the extra-parliamentary extreme left in our democracies.
