In the framework of the Swiss Chair Seminar Series, this session features a talk by Matthias Leese (ETH Zurich).
European security cooperation today heavily relies on digital forms of information exchange. The Schengen Information System (SIS) is the most prominent example, as it interconnects 31 countries and multiple EU agencies, contains more than 90 million records, and processes billions of queries annually. From a political perspective, it is routinely invoked as a model of successful collaboration in a critical sector – yet closer examination reveals a complex and vulnerable infrastructure that very much depends on the ongoing reconciliation of legal, political, and technical differences. Based on in-depth empirical engagement with the transnational community of professionals who operate and maintain the SIS, I suggest to understand digital information sharing infrastructures as fragile assemblages that are held together by what I conceptualise as a repertoire of ongoing care practices that span the entire lifecycle of information (i.e. its creation, validation, aggregation, querying, and operational use) and mediate between divergent national legal regimes, institutional mandates, and technical standards.
While such care practices are indispensable to the functioning of contemporary security cooperation in Europe, they remain undervalued and largely invisible vis-a-vis academic and political discourses that foreground big data analytics, algorithmic decision-making, and automated intelligence extraction. An empirical focus on care, so I put forward, brings into view the ways in which vulnerabilities, errors, and breakdowns are managed rather than eliminated, and how interoperability is less a stable achievement than a contingent, continuously renewed accomplishment. By theorising care as a mode of governance, the analysis opens a conceptual and empirical space for understanding transnational security cooperation not solely through the lens of integration, but also through the everyday labor that enables such cooperation to persist in the face of persistent complexity, uneven resources, and competing sovereignties.
Matthias Leese is Assistant Professor for Technology and Governance at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zurich. His research is interested in the effects of digital technologies on social order. It pays specific attention to security organizations and their rationales and practices that are co-constituted between the technological and the social. He has published widely in leading journals in the fields of International Relations, Science and Technology Studies, and Criminology. Together with Simon Egbert, he is co-author of 'Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work'. In 2021, he has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the study of data quality in European law enforcement and border control cooperation (CURATE). His current book project investigates questions of complexity and care practices in the Schengen Information System.