Event Date: March 12, 2025 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS and the Security Studies Network

“Good data, they are trustworthy, first of all. They are clear and… It’s data that I can, yes, the trustworthiness, that is the most important thing for data, I think.” This is how a case officer working at a national level center for international police cooperation in a European country, during an interview, framed the most important requirement for information stored in the Schengen Information System (SIS). The SIS is Europe’s oldest and largest international security database. It pools and redistributes more than 90 million records from 29 countries relevant for law enforcement, border control and asylum, as well as judicial cooperation. 

This project empirically investigates the question of how operational and technical experts build trust throughout the multi-level digital knowledge infrastructure of the SIS. Building on a qualitative methodological framework, it develops the notion of “data curation” as a key concept in increasingly data-driven and algorithmically mediated international security contexts. Building on recent problematizations of care work in digital environments, the analysis retraces how security professionals at the national and EU level curate SIS data in different ways.

Understanding the everyday knowledge functions of multi-level information systems through the notions of trust and care has major implications for the study of international politics. As regional and global data collection schemes form the backbone of evidence-based policymaking and interventions, the work of the back office experts responsible for data quality and data governance has largely been silenced. Yet, as this project shows, they carry out key tasks that underpin the ways in which state and private actors perceive the world and act upon it.

Speaker:

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 data trust and related curation practices in the Schengen Information System.

Chair:

Philippe Frowd is an Associate Professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa.