Taking the trouble: science, technology and security studies

Bellanova, Rocco; Jacobsen, Katja Lindskov; Monsees, Linda

doi:10.1080/21624887.2020.1839852

Cited by 50 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 97 publications

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“…Second, we intend to make the case that drawing from science and technology studies (STS), which has examined the innovation‐security‐industry interface more closely than EU studies has, offers novel insights. While there is growing interest in what STS approaches beyond Latourian actor‐network theory might bring to the engagement of critical security studies with technology (Bellanova et al, 2020; Evans et al, 2020), we suggest that EU studies as a discipline can also benefit from such interactions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of EU Defence: The Past and the Future in the European Defence Fund

Martins

Mawdsley

2021

J of Common Market Studies

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In this article we investigate how a particular vision of the future of EU defence has embedded itself into different arenas of EU politics over decades, and is currently gaining material expression in the European Defence Fund (EDF). Through an historiographic approach, we traced the development of a particular narrative on security, innovation, research, and economic growth based on fears of technology gaps and dependence on the US, and a belief in the potential of military R&D to produce civilian benefits. We provide an alternative reading of the emergence of the EDF by drawing on literature within Science and Technology Studies, in particular the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, to highlight wider socio-political dimensions of defence technologies and expand debates on EU defence.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of EU Defence: The Past and the Future in the European Defence Fund

Martins

Mawdsley

2021

J of Common Market Studies

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“…Building on recent dialogue between critical border and security studies and STS (Bellanova, Jacobsen, and Monsees 2020;Evans, Leese, and Rychnovská 2021;Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019), we contend that approaches, insights, and analytical sensitivities from STS can provide border and migration scholars with a rich methodological and conceptual resource to investigate how data reconfigure the production of knowledge and authority. Starting from the notion that the social and the technical should not be conceived as separate spheres but rather as constitutive of sociotechnical systems that are coined by interactive dynamics between human and nonhuman elements (Law 1991), STS literature has proposed to analyse the interplay of data, organisational structures, and human experience and expertise through concepts such as "co-production" (Jasanoff 2004), "actornetwork" (Latour 2005a), or "intra-action" (Barad 2007).…”

Section: How Data Come To Mattermentioning

confidence: 95%

Data Matters: The Politics and Practices of Digital Border and Migration Management

2021

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Data matter more than ever in the regulation of borders and migration. An apt illustration of how movement is enabled or restricted by data collection and analytics was recently reported by Eyal Weizman, founding director of the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture that specialises in the production and analysis of evidence about human rights violations by state and corporate actors. Prior to a business trip to Miami where he was supposed to open Forensic Architecture's first major exhibition in the US that, among other things, displayed investigations into a CIA drone strike in Pakistan and police killings of black US citizens, Weizmann was notified that his visa waiver request had been denied and that he would not be allowed to enter the United States.Upon further inquiry at the US embassy in London, he was informed that he had been flagged as a 'security threat' by an algorithm looking for suspicious patterns in applicants' data. While officials at the embassy could not tell Weizman what exactly had triggered the unfavourable judgement by the algorithm, they suggested that "it could be something [he] was involved in, people [he] was in contact with, places to which [he] had travelled (had [he] recently been in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia or met their nationals?), hotels at which [he] stayed, or a certain pattern of relations among these things" (Weizman 2020, n.p.). Weizman was subsequently encouraged to provide the US Department of Homeland Security with details on individuals or connections that could point in the direction of terrorism or organised crime in order to purify himself and eventually be able to travel again. Since the digital records that had prompted the algorithm to flag Weizman as a security risk concerned personal and professional networks and connections that informed investigative work into human rights violations -including those committed by US institutions and their allies -Weizman declined to provide this information.Weizman's case forcefully illustrates how the "datafication of mobility and migration management" (Broeders and Dijstelbloem 2016) reconfigures what

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“…This paper builds on a growing field of IR scholars adopting Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches (Aradau 2010;Bellanova 2017;Best and Walters 2013;Bosma 2020;de Goede 2017;Salter and Walters 2016). It is part of a special issue advancing the conversation between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and IR (see Bellanova, Lindskov Jacobsen, and Monsees 2020), examining how STS may contribute to IR on such topics as studying media controversies (Monsees 2020) or the challenges of producing critique (de Goede 2020). Drawing on both ANT and STS scholarship, this paper aims to conceptually contribute to the question of how to study the international, and how to accommodate the study of scale when researching formations of scope in situated practice.…”

Section: Engaging In 'Flat Ir'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Flattening the international: producing financial intelligence through a platform

Lagerwaard

2020

Critical Studies on Security

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This paper engages in 'flat' International Relations (IR). Inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), it studies how geographically dispersed security actors produce shared understandings of financial intelligence on the EU-FIU Platform, a European Commission expert group. Studying the Platform enables empirical observation of how 'the international' is not a natural given nor a static analytical framework, but instead is actively made to exist in everyday practice, entailing numerous human and nonhuman actors. Engaging the Platform with a flat ontology allows the significance of materiality to be drawn out and key IR concerns such as power and governance to be readdressed. The paper examines the publicly accessible minutes of the EU-FIU Platform meetings and traces the development of the phrase 'for intelligence purposes', demonstrating both its interpretive flexibility, allowing actors to cooperate across heterogeneous understandings, and its flexible scalability, allowing actors to assign and navigate several scales concurrently.

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Taking the trouble: science, technology and security studies

Cited by 50 publications

References 97 publications

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of EU Defence: The Past and the Future in the European Defence Fund

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of EU Defence: The Past and the Future in the European Defence Fund

Data Matters: The Politics and Practices of Digital Border and Migration Management

Flattening the international: producing financial intelligence through a platform

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