This report by Stop Wapenhandel and the Transnational Institute (TNI) exposes how universities are embedded in the EU’s border regime, driving the militarisation, surveillance, and externalisation of migration control. It reveals a growing border-industrial-academic complex and challenges academia’s role in legitimising and advancing policies that systematically harm and exclude people on the move.
Key points
Since 2016, TNI’s Border Wars series has exposed the EU’s efforts to securitise, militarise and externalise its borders, focusing especially on the role of the military and security industry. This report examines the role universities play in this endeavour. Its findings show that the scale and depth of university involvement in the EU border regime has led to the emergence of what can be termed a border-industrial-academic complex.
The report finds that:
- Universities play an indispensable, if often obscured, role in the development, perpetuation and expansion of ‘Fortress Europe’. They provide research, analysis, data, and new technologies, as well as an illusion of scientific legitimacy to policies and practices that are ethically questionable and routinely violate fundamental rights. Sometimes universities take this as far as willingly involving themselves in legally dubious research and fieldwork, as shown by some of the more controversial case studies covered in the report.
- From 2002 to May 2025, over 200 universities, higher-education institutions, and academies participated in 110 EU Framework Programme projects related to border security and control, receiving a total of over €100 million in EU funding. Most were part of consortia that often included arms and IT companies as well as EU member state border authorities. Arms corporations Leonardo and Thales and the Fraunhofer research organisation appear most frequently as partners of universities in these consortia.
- The three largest university beneficiaries of this funding are Laurea-Ammattikorkeaukoulu (Finland), University of Reading (UK) and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). All three have participated in particularly controversial projects.
- Universities play a significant role in research projects which are rooted in the humanities and social sciences. These include projects about forecasting migration, scenario-planning, and analysing the drivers of migration and decision-making processes of people on the move. These projects explicitly aim to generate insights that support the development of largely repressive border and migration policies.
- In “technical” Framework Programme border security and control projects, universities participate in most consortia, which arms companies often lead. These projects span a wide range of border-control technologies. The report documents universities working on biometrics, surveillance, AI, lie detection, drones and other unmanned systems, and tools designed to automate decision-making in sensitive situations.
- Apart from the Framework Program funding the EU uses several other instruments to fund university (research) work in the field of border security and control. The report details funding for controversial ‘awareness-raising’ projects designed to deter people from migrating, as well as for border externalisation efforts. Maastricht University (Netherlands) plays a significant role in EU-funded training of border guards from non-EU-countries.
- Universities also seek to commercialise the results of (EU-funded) research, including through spin-off companies. The report highlights cases in which such spin-offs have marketed controversial border-control technologies such as supposed AI “lie detectors” and heartbeat detectors, which were sold to the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex and the UK Border Force.
- Frontex, a central node in the EU’s securitised border regime, is often intended as a direct end user of university-led research and development and a bridge to the industry. In December 2022, Frontex launched its own Research Grants Programme for border security technology, funding small-scale projects largely led by universities.
- Frontex also cooperates with universities on training and education, including on a Joint Master’s programme in Strategic Border Management, and a wider network of Partnership Academies that host meetings and training activities. In the field of border externalisation Frontex also trains border guards from non-EU-countries. This includes a longstanding cooperation with the Naif Arab University for Security Sciences (NAUSS), linked to the Saudi royal family, one of the world’s most repressive regimes.
- The EU increasingly seeks to ‘bridge the gap’ between academic research, policymaking and real-life applications. In doing so, it seeks to ensure that the research it funds connects to its political priorities and to that end facilitates interactions with end-users in industry and government, for example through Frontex workshops. The Community for European Research and Innovation for Security (CERIS) plays a central role in this process by aligning research agendas with official security narratives. This approach narrows research questions from the outset, shapes which findings and recommendations are taken up, and inevitably makes future funding dependent on how well projects meet the end-user demands.
- At universities there appears to be limited acknowledgement that findings from EU-funded research are likely to be used to reinforce current EU border and migration policies, shaped by a strong security and deterrence narrative. Past experience suggests that the hope, expressed by some researchers, that factual evidence and analysis will steer policymakers towards a more humane course is misplaced. Advance ethical assessments tend to avoid these issues by focusing narrowly on ethics within the research process itself. As a result, a broader question typically remains unaddressed: whether it is ethical at all to work for, or with, governments and agencies that use this research to develop and implement repressive, rights-violating border and migration policies.
- This dynamic is also reflected in the ethics checks for Framework Programmes projects. These checks are mostly based on self-assessment by the consortia partners and often treated as a box-ticking exercise, sidestepping questions about real-world harms the research results – and the policies and practices they support – may cause. Universities and other organisations involved in such research, however well-intentioned, are ultimately complicit in the harmful outcomes of a process that falls short of its stated ethical standards.
- Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the EU has accelerated efforts to expand its military role and capacities both within NATO and alongside it, and to support the military and security industry. A “whole-of-society” militarisation trend is drawing universities into closer cooperation with military and security forces and with industry. As higher education becomes more militarised and securitised, there is less scope and funding for research that does not serve military, border-security, or dual-use purposes, which narrows research agendas and sidelines dissent.
Read the report ‘Border Labs: How Universities Power Europe’s Border Regime’