SODAS Lecture: Making a European Data Union – Security, politics and database interoperability

SODAS lecture
We are delighted to host Rocco Bellanova for this SODAS Lecture
Title:

Making a European Data Union – Security, politics and database interoperability

Abstract:

There is a European Data Union in the making. Even before the adoption of the so-called Interoperability Regulations in 2019, public authorities and institutions had been vocal about their ambition of making information stored in existing and future autonomous databases interconnected and available to various authorities across Europe. The domains of security, border controls and migration governance are those in which database interoperability is currently being implemented on the ground. While law scholars have already pointed out the implications and challenges raised by a shift that is far from being purely technical, we still know very little about the political dimension of such infrastructural re-ordering. In this lecture, I will sketch the contours of two ongoing processes concerning database interoperability (the creation of a data-lake at Europol and the interconnection of EU-centralized databases).  I will suggest that works from Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data Studies can help us refine International Relations’ and EU studies’ conceptual tool-boxes for studying the relation between digital technologies and European security practices.

Bio: 

Rocco Bellanova is Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (interdisciplinary research group Law, Science, Technology & Society-LSTS). He is the PI of the ERC project DATAUNION - The European Data Union: European Security Integration through Database Interoperability. Before joining VUB, Rocco was Assistant Professor of Critical Data Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He also carried out his research in the department of Political Science of UvA, the Institute for European Studies of the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO. His work sits at the intersection of politics, law, and science and technology studies. He studies how digital data become pivotal elements in the governing of societies. His research focuses on European security practices and the role of data protection therein. He has co-edited the book Surveillance, Privacy and Security. Citizens' Perspectives (Routledge - 2017) and special issues focusing on digital sovereignty (2022), scholarly practices of critique (2019) and science and technology in security practices (2020). He has published in journals such as Regulation & Governance, Journal of Common Market Studies, European Security, Geopolitics, Security Dialogue, European Journal of Social Theory, International Political Sociology.



This autumn, the theme of the SODAS lecture series is "Global Data Politics".

Global Data Politics 

Almost everything we do – how we meet, vote, shop, socialize or love – has become infused with, and is constantly generating new, digital data. Such data has helped generate entire professions such as (social) data science, and providing new insights into personal habits and convictions. With its capacity to reconfigure social relations, data has become the object of both local political struggles and activism and large-scale geopolitical clashes. In this lecture series, we investigate the emerging field of global data politics and turn to questions about the simultaneous datafication of politics and the politicization of data: What is the place of data in contemporary democracies? Does data have a nationality? How can and should cross-border data flows be governed and regulated? Can states, companies – or citizens – become digitally sovereign? Who owns (digital) data and their material infrastructure and why does this matter? (How) can we use digital data to change the world?