Proposed Workshop for ISA 2024: Deciphering the New International Politics of Surveillance: Transversing Between International Political Sociology (IPS) and International Political Economy (IPE)
Matthew Eagleton-Pierce
Dear Colleagues
Along with Oliver Kessler (Universität Erfurt), we propose to organise an ISA Workshop for April 2nd, 2024 in San Francisco. We are seeking expressions of interest for participating in the workshop. If you are keen to participate or curious about the agenda, please get back to us. Deadline for responses is: Tues 27th June.
The core details are as follows below.
Best wishes
Matt and Oliver
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(1) Title
Deciphering the New International Politics of Surveillance: Transversing Between International Political Sociology (IPS) and International Political Economy (IPE)
(2) Main Research Question or Problem
From the monitoring of communications by intelligence agencies to the management of Covid-19, the international politics of surveillance has become a topical and often controversial debate. Existing scholarship in IR – often clustered within International Political Sociology (IPS) and International Political Economy (IPE) – has explored some key dimensions of this topic. But IPS and IPE theorists often do not engage with each other. To understand surveillance as involving both security and political economy features, to the extent that they often conjoin and co-construct under what we call security capitalism, this workshop seeks to bridge IPS and IPE for advancing wider understanding.
(3) Expanded Justification
The topic of surveillance enjoyed notable attention during the war on terror. New surveillance tactics have led many authors to talk about a surveillance society. This debate has taken place – and indeed has also reshaped – the field of security studies. In respect to existing research on the politics of surveillance with International Political Sociology (IPS), we can note some significant contributions. Building upon pioneering advances in surveillance studies (Lyon 2003, 2006; for a theory overview, see Galič et al. 2017), Bigo’s work has long featured attention to surveillance practices, such as the notion of the banopticon to explain profiling technologies (Bigo 2008), and critiques of the mass collection of personal data by EU member states (Bigo et al. 2016). Following the revelations about US-NSA programs in 2013, a group of leading scholars charted a new agenda, one that argued that the phenomenon was more serious than a binary distinction between surveillance versus privacy, but included complex organisational, political, and ethical stakes (Bauman et al. 2014). Elsewhere, related IPS research has probed the difficulties of contesting surveillance practices politically and the threats posed to democracy (Gros et al. 2017; Aradau and McCluskey 2022); the ongoing digitization of border controls for controlling maritime flow (Glouftsios and Loukinas 2022); and the benefits of critical approaches to intelligence studies (Ben Jafffel et al. 2020). In sum, the treatment of surveillance continues to be a productive area of research, with a particular concern on the links to coercive state power and knowledge.
Over the last five years, however, we can witness how the question of surveillance has also entered key debates in the broader field of political economy. For instance, the Covid-19 pandemic came with new monitoring practices of workforces and private life. The recent regulations by the EU on supply chain monitoring now demand companies to examine and control possible human rights violations in their supply chains. At a macro level, the recent advent of geoeconomics has turned the focus on structural vulnerabilities and the resilience of economic systems. The recent law case of the SEC against crypto-exchanges and certain digital coins deals not only with the question of whether coins are assets, but who controls the data and who has access and can monitor transactions.
In International Political Economy (IPE), this theme of surveillance has surfaced in a variety of pressing enquiries. Historically, it can be argued that capitalism has always been preoccupied with surveillance as a political-economic means to monitor threats and opportunities, notably within labour processes and consumer behaviour (Fuchs 2012). Elsewhere, there has been a particular use of the term surveillance in how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acts as a disciplinary ‘global monitor’, guiding financial markets (Breen and Doak 2023). Prompted by Zuboff’s (2019) argument that surveillance capitalism is a new phase of commodification leading to increasing economic and political inequality, researchers have explored how ‘algorithmic surveillance’ can leverage managerial oversight with reduced human input, often intensifying worker stress in the platform or gig economy (Moore and Joyce 2020; Langley and Leyshon 2021; Moore and Roy 2022). Within these studies, and others, researchers have been keen to document not only the perpetuation of class-specific inequalities, but also gendered and racialised biases in the operation of surveillance systems, a problem that has become more acute given advances in artificial intelligence (Keskin and Kiggins 2021; Srivastava 2021).
These conversations occur at the intersection between IPS and IPE. Yet each section does not engage much with the other and, instead, tends to organise debates within separate communities and journals. To understand surveillance as a process of de-differentiation between economic and security issues within the broader advent of what we call security capitalism, this workshop thus seeks to bridge these two separate communities. Otherwise, we continue to miss valuable connections, such as around theoretical innovation, the connections between security politics and commodification, and the dissection of materialist ontologies and subjectivities. Such enquires matter across a range of macro problems in IR, including: the assessment of state and corporate power; the political management of security problems; and the quality of democracy and resistance in light of authoritarian tendencies.
The central objective of the workshop is thus to fuse together the insights from IPS and IPE in order to decipher the contemporary politics of surveillance. The workshop argues that there is an urgent need to assess the material infrastructures, operations, justifications, and socio-political consequences provoked by the evolving processes of modern surveillance. Among key lines of enquiry, the workshop proposes to focus on the following areas:
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Theoretical debates on surveillance: how can IPS and IPE researchers learn from each other on the best conceptual analysis for grasping surveillance systems and practices? Do we find ongoing relevance from the visions of Bentham and Foucault, or is it necessary to further advance post-panopticon approaches where computerised processes are central, as captured by Zuboff? How can we consider Lyon’s notion of surveillance as being hypothetically as much about care and protection as it is about control and exploitation?
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Surveillance and the forms of power in world politics: in terms of its construction and multiple effects, what kind of power is surveillance? Is surveillance a dimension of structural power, productive power, compulsory power or something else?
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The politics of surveillance functionality: in both IPS and IPE, the turn towards materialism, along with specific debates on infrastructure and technology, invites attention to the operationalisation of particular surveillance systems. To the best of our public knowledge, how do such systems function or fail, and where do we see the imprint of political choices?
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Surveillance and the management of ‘problematic populations’: a connecting thread between IPS and IPE scholarship involves how surveillance is used for classifying, tracking, and disciplining agents and categories that are ‘problematic’ to established institutions (such as being a commercial, security, or political ‘threat’). How can we compare these common deployments and justifications for surveillance across IPS and IPE cases?
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Surveillance, democracy, and the politics of resistance: how viable are strategies of resistance in the face of complex and obaque regimes of surveillance? In what ways can legal or other political approaches shed a sharper democratic light on surveillance practices?
The results from the workshop are expected to lead to a follow-up workshop and, subsequently, published papers in either a special journal issue or an edited volume.
References
Aradau, C. and McCluskey, E., ‘Making Digital Surveillance Unacceptable? Security, Democracy, and the Political Sociology of Disputes’, International Political Sociology, 16 (2022), 1.
Bauman, Z., Bigo, D., Esteves, P., Guild, E., Jabri, V., Lyon, D., and Walker, R. B. J., ‘After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance’, International Political Sociology, 8 (2014), 2, 121-144.
Ben Jaffel, H., Hoffmann, A., Kearns, O., and Larsson, S., ‘Collective Discussion: Toward Critical Approaches to Intelligence as a Social Phenomenon’, International Political Sociology, 14 (2020), 3, 323-344.
Bigo, D., ‘Globalized (In)security: the Field and the Ban-opticon’, in Bigo, D. and Tsoukala, A. (eds), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008).
Bigo D., Jeandesboz, J., Ragazzi, F., and Bonditti, P., Borders and Security: The Different Logics of Surveillance in Europe (Brussels: Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 2011).
Breen, M. and Doak, E., ‘The IMF as a Global Monitor: Surveillance, Information, and Financial Markets’, Review of International Political Economy, 30 (2023), 1, 307-331.
Fuchs, C., ‘Political Economy and Surveillance Theory’, Critical Sociology, 39 (2012), 5, 671-687.
Galič, M., Timan, T., and Koops, B. J., ‘Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation’, Philosophy & Technology, 30 (2017), 9-37.
Glouftsios, G. and Loukinas, P., ‘Perceiving and Controlling Maritime Flows. Technology, Kinopolitics, and the Governmentalization of Vision’, International Political Sociology, 16 (2022), 3.
Gros, V., de Goede, M., and İşleyen, B., ‘The Snowden Files Made Public: A Material Politics of Contesting Surveillance’, International Political Sociology, 11 (2017), 1, 73-89.
Keskin, T. and Kiggins, R. D. (eds), Towards an International Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Springer, 2021).
Langley, P. and Leyshon, A., ‘The Platform Political Economy of FinTech: Reintermediation, Consolidation and Capitalisation’, New Political Economy, 26 (2021), 3, 376-388.
Lyon, D., Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Automated Discrimination (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003). Lyon, D. (ed.), Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon And Beyond (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).
Moore, P. V. and Joyce, S., ‘Black Box or Hidden Abode? The Expansion and Exposure of Platform Work Managerialism’, Review of International Political Economy, 27 (2020), 4, 926-948.
Moore, P. V. and Roy, C., ‘Advancing Arguments on Technology, Work and the Body in the Global Political Economy’, Global Political Economy, 1 (2022), 1, 108-121.
Srivastava, S., ‘Algorithmic Governance and the International Politics of Big Tech’, Perspectives on Politics, First View 23 November 2021, 1-12.
Zuboff, S., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019).
Dr Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (DPhil Oxon)
Reader (Associate Professor) in International Political Economy
SOAS University of London
Department of Politics and International Studies
Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
Convenor: BSc in Politics, Philosophy and Economics
QS World University Politics Rankings 2022: SOAS #5 UK, #6 Europe, #15 World
Personal Website
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