Event Date: March 13, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm EST
Location: FSS 4004

Presented by CIPS

This talk focuses on the large-scale coercive or intrusive surveillance operations undertaken by secret services and private actors and asks to what extent their activities are adequately monitored and regulated by national supervisory authorities. In the most powerful countries (US, UK and France) the very existence of independent oversight mechanisms is contested. Secret foreign affairs cannot be democratised. Slippage is inevitable. Impunity must be tolerated, even in cases of torture. The refusal to accept the existence of oversight in a multinational framework (Five Eyes) is symbolised by the Third Party rule which excludes access to ‘foreign’ data by supervisors, even if they are cleared for secrecy. This deadlock has led to violations of the fundamental rights of people unfairly targeted by these networked services. The trust between them, which was promoted as an essential value, has been paid for by a loss of public confidence in national institutions (agencies and supervisory bodies) suspected of sometimes being more favourable to the interests of the allied services than to their own national interests, which creates a legitimacy dilemma.

Speaker:

Professor Didier Bigo is research professor of International Political Sociology at Sciences-Po Paris-CERI, France. He is also part time professor at King’s College London, department of War studies. He is the Director of the Centre d’ Etudes sur les Conflits, la Liberté, la Sécurité (CECLS). He is the co-editor of Cultures et Conflits- L’Harmattan-CECLS, as well as the co-editor of Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS). 

His latest publications include “Violence Performed in Secret by State Agents: For an Alternative Problematisation of Intelligence Studies” in Problematising Intelligence Studies Towards A New Research Agenda; The Routledge Handbook of Critical European Studies (2020); “Adjusting a Bourdieusian Approach to the Study of Transnational Fields;” and an open-access publication Data Politics Routledge.

Moderator:

Dr. Rita Abrahamsen, Director of CIPS and Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. Her research interests are in African politics and security, Africa and International Relations, postcolonial theory, as well as the Global Right.