Search

The dematerialisation of physical borders via the digitisation of the process of control has changed the ways we understand international frontiers. Surveillance of the borders are now exercised at a distance, before individuals arrive. Even if most border guards insist that they have the ultimate (sovereign) right to decide who enters, the development of pre-check-in databases have de facto displaced the modalities of authentification and identification of travellers. This chapter depicts these changes, and shows how control is ‘distributed’ along the journeys of the passengers, and between many different actors, who are not all, by any means, public agents. The role of corporate actors are crucial.

In the second part of this interview, Yves Dezalay – an Emeritus cnrs researcher who spent much of his professional career at the Centre of European Sociology in Paris – takes us even deeper into his trajectory as a scholar. In situating the institutional-intellectual spaces in which he circulated, Dezalay brings to life the inter/intra-disciplinary boundaries he regularly crossed and even forced open in his quest to understand the complexity of interconnections between the national and the international, the professional and the political, as well as the law and the state in overlapping processes of globalization. Speaking about his long-term collaboration with professor of law Bryant Garth, Dezalay also elaborates a collaborationist methodology of transversal, multi-sited research.

Issu d’une table-ronde reunissant des chercheurs d’horizons disciplinaires et de generations differentes, cette discussion revient sur les lectures, les usages et les debats que suscite la sociologie d’Yves Dezalay. Cet echange est l’occasion de partager des reflexions plus personnelles sur les pratiques de l’enquete globale mais aussi sur les positions occupees et les rapports au metier de chercheur construits au fil du temps. Les debats permettent de revenir sur tous ces concepts de « moyenne portee », si nombreux au fil de son travail (« compradors », « courtiers de l’international », « agents doubles », « import-export d’Etat », « luttes de palais », etc.), de discuter du systeme d’hypotheses formulees par Yves Dezalay, et de resituer celles-ci dans un ensemble d’ecarts et de proximites avec d’autres courants (Relations internationales, histoire connectee ou sociologie critique).

This article examines the notion of shared secrets and the procedures by which secrecy is not the opposite of exchange of information, but the restriction of it to a certain ‘circle’ of people and the maintenance of others in ignorance. It creates corridors depending on the objectives of secret information, the persons having access, and the knowledge of this access by other people. Shared secrecy has been considered as an exception to common practice, but it has changed in scale with digitization and transnationalization of information, especially when suspicion is becoming used in statistical terms for prevention purposes.

This article transects and articulates different disciplines and lines of thought in order to understand the redefinitions of the boundaries of political power in times of COVID-19, and the practices which may outlive the potential normalisation of the crisis when an efficient vaccine is discovered. We claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is an original form of governmentality by unease articulating three dimensions. First, the basic reaction of modern states when faced with uncertainty is to apply national-territorial logics of controls. Second, bureaucracies consider the virus as a danger to security and organise public health emergencies according to the rules of the game of national security, creating tensions between internal security, public health and the economy because policymakers may be unsure about the priorities and may prioritise border controls. Third, resistance against the chosen national policies show that people are not led by a politics of fear and/or protection, but rather their own concerns about themselves with peer-to-peer surveillance as a key element of their compliance. Contact tracing technologies and strategies of border controls are key elements to analyse. We do so in different contexts: the UK, the EU and Turkey.

Data has become a social and political issue not only because it concerns anyone who is connected to the Internet but also because it reconfigures relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. Just about every device is now connected to the Internet and generating vast quantities of digital traces about interactions, transactions and movements whether users are aware or not. What started as an ostensibly liberated space the Internet rapidly became the space over and through which governments and corporations began collecting, storing, retrieving, analysing, and producing data that analyses what people do and say on the Internet. This ranges from who communicates with whom, who goes where, and who says what – and much more besides. This is now being augmented with data that people produce about themselves, especially their relations, body movements and measurements; the amount and range of data that has become available is, as everyone now knows, staggering. This chapter introduces the main themes of the book to position these developments within a broad historical-sociological perspective and to articulate an international political sociology of data politics.

Since Edward Snowden disclosures on NSA’s practices, many articles have been written about the relationship between digital data and Intelligence Services (IS), although few of them have investigated the use of these data by IS’ in their everyday practices. Presenting the first results of a three years research including interviews with practitioners and adopting a Bourdieusian perspective, this chapter proposes first to reflect on data ownership and the way IS intercept data and construct them for their own purposes, second with whom and how do they exchange data (trans)nationally. To this effect, we draw a transnational space of the objective positions of the different forms of capital mobilized by the various types of IS. As a result, three distinct groups emerge depending on the structural proximity of the type of institutional objectives they defend and by the way they use digital technology in order share data. Cooperation appears to be stronger at the transnational level than at the national one. In that respect, the linkage between positions, professional habitus and practices constitutes a challenging counterpoint both to the methodological nationalism, that presupposes the existence of a national intelligence community, and to a fairly common perspective in international relations and security studies that provides a disembodied analysis of intelligence practices and an history without actors.

Through a critical engagement with substantive and stylistic guidelines dictated by dominant journals in the social sciences, this article enquires on what it means to write like a social scientist in the twenty-first century. Academic production and diffusion now regularly take place beyond and across national borders, with English often standing in as the lingua franca of these global exchanges. Though just one effect of this restructuration, academic journals have become more transnational in scope with regards to the authors whose work they publish and the audiences whose readership they seek to attract. However, while one could expect the “globalization” of the social sciences to lead to the transnational circulation of national disciplinary traditions and perhaps multiple manifestations of cultural hybridization, we are instead witnessing the imposition of a strangely singular and harmonized mode of doing the social sciences. Paradoxically, standards of how long a scientific article should be or how one should fashion an argument are so familiar and intimately known, yet curiously opaque and of unknown origins. In interrogating the historical-contextual origins of conventions that so strongly shape the world of academic publishing and, dare we say, reasoning, we raise questions about the conditions of the present and the naturalization of standards on how to write a scientific article. As a consequence of this exploration, we propose alternatives guidelines that a new journal such as ours has to present to its anticipated authors and readers.

Este artículo tiene como objetivo discutir las premisas en las que descansa una cierta visión de la inseguridad global, que, ante todo, la considera una consecuencia «natural» de los ataques que afectaron a los Estados Unidos, Australia, Turquía, España y, recientemente, el Reino Unido. Y que, además plantea que la mundialización de los profesionales de seguridad se produce como consecuencia y única solución efectiva a esta inseguridad global. A partir del trabajo de Pierre Bourdieu y Michel Foucault, el autor se propone comprender cuándo y cómo se desarrolló este discurso sobre la «mundialización de la seguridad» a través de las nociones de campo de profesionales de gestión de las inquietudes y transnacionalización de los procesos de (in) seguridad. Se presta especial atención a la forma en que estos procesos están vinculados a las transformaciones de la violencia política, pero también al desarrollo europeo y transatlántico del aparato policial, militar y de inteligencia, a su estructuración en un campo profesional y a sus efectos en nuestras sociedades de riesgo, duda, incertidumbre. This article suggests a discussion on the premises on which rest a specific vision of global (in)security -as a «natural» consequence of the attacks suffered by the US, Australia, Turkey, Spain, and very recently the United-Kingdom- and the corollary of a unique and efficient solution: the globalisation of security professionals and their cooperation against barbarism. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault’s works, the author tries to understand when and how this discourse on the «globalisation of (in)security» developed through the notions of field of the professionals of unease management and of transnationalisation of (in)securisation processes. A particular attention is given to the way in which these processes are linked to the transformations of political violence but also to the European and Transatlantic development of the police, military, and intelligence agencies, to their structuration in a professional field, and to their effects on our societies of risk, doubt, and uncertainty.

Cet article porte sur l’emergence de groupes transnationaux lies par une forme de solidarite attachee a leur travail quotidien, a des savoir-faire et des savoirs specifiques qui transcendent souvent les differences nationales. A travers l’etude de ces groupes, il s’agit de contribuer a une meilleure comprehension de la maniere dont se fabriquent les frontieres entre differentes echelles, dans un monde dit « fracture ». Il s’agit egalement de montrer que la construction de ces multiples limites releve de lignes transversales et de dynamiques de pouvoir. Ces groupes, lorsqu’ils echangent des informations, des savoir-faire, des lieux de vie au niveau transnational forment-ils ou non un ensemble coherent, une elite professionnelle, une classe sociale globale, qui disposerait d’un programme d’action et de priorites propres ? Repondant en partie negativement, nous proposons le terme plus precis de guilde transnationale pour faire comprendre ce qui se joue la.

L’information numérique est à l’évidence devenue un enjeu et un objet central du travail des services de renseignement. La plupart d’entre eux intègrent désormais dans leur activité routinière le recueil de données personnelles venant de multiples secteurs de la vie sociale d’un individu et de ses relations, ainsi que leur analyse. Mais ils le font de manière diverse selon leur ancienneté dans le métier, leurs capacités en termes de personnel, de moyens financiers et technologiques, et surtout selon leurs visions de ce qu’est l’activité de renseignement. À partir de l’étude des principaux services de neuf pays occidentaux (États-Unis, Grande-Bretagne, Canada, Australie, Nouvelle-Zélande, France, Allemagne, Espagne et Suède), cet article se propose de construire rigoureusement un espace transnational du renseignement. La mise en relation des positions et des discours de ces acteurs avec leurs pratiques et le sens qu’ils leur donnent permet de comprendre les homologies ou, au contraire, les différences irréductibles qui structurent ensuite les coopérations et les types d’échange de données. “We aren’t a Big Brother!” The Authority and Legitimization Strategies of Intelligence Services in the Capture and Use of Digital Data - Digital information has undeniably become a central issue and object in the work of intelligence services. Most agencies have now integrated the collection and analysis of personal data on multiple elements of an individual’s social life and relationships into their daily work routines. However, how this is done varies and depends very much on one’s seniority in their profession, their capacity in terms of human, financial, and technological resources, and, most importantly, their vision of what intelligence is as an activity. Based on a study of the principal intelligence services of nine Western countries (United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden), this article constructs a rigorous mapping of a transnational space of intelligence. In order to make sense of inter-agency cooperation and modes of exchanging data, we analyze the structuration of this space through the homologies and unsolvable differences that arise in relation to the positions and discourses of these actors regarding their practices and the meaning they give to them.

II existe un impense quant a la constitution de la categorie d’analyse du terrorisme qui merite reflexion car il conditionne en amont quasiment toutes les ‘evidences’ et tous les discours des acteurs sur le sujet des politiques antiterroristes. La quasi totalite des analyses confondent les attentats, faits materiels assortis de violence directe et produisant souvent des victimes, et le terrorisme, denomination donnee par certains acteurs (les acteurs en position dominante) a ces phenomenes. Cet impense fait croire a une naturalite de la categorie de terrorisme, au fait qu’il a toujours existe et qu’il est un signe de la barbarie de certains etre humains. Le terrorisme existe done et quelque part il a toujours existe a travers toutes les epoques sous des formes diverses. Le terrorisme est un fait. Oser mettre en question cette affirmation, c’est immediatement, aux yeux de certains, insulter les victimes des attentats ou chercher a justifier les actes de ceux qui commettent les attentats. Au contraire, il est indispensable de faire cette distinction entre d’une part les attentats, les assassinats qui sont les marqueurs d’une forme de la violence collective qui dans une societe a toujours des causes relationnelles et dont les actes pour etre compris doivent etre reinseres au sein du tissu societal et d’autres part des interactions politiques au sein desquelles le terrorisme est un moyen d’accuser l’autre d’etre le seul responsable, le seul fauteur de trouble. On comprend alors mieux ce qu’est le terrorisme et l’antiterrorisme car, bien plus qu’une lutte armee, c’est deja sur le terrain du conflit de legitimite (et done des usages semantiques) que se deroule les combats, meme s’ils ne s’y cantonnent pas.

This article seeks to discuss the emergence of transnational groups coming from the core of state bureaucracies and what has sometimes been called the “deep” or “right hand” of the state. In doing so, the article aims to explore the groups’ degree of autonomy in terms of elaboration of politics and their place within the different fields of power that irrigate the international. Are these groups exchanging information transnationally or not? Do they form a group, an elite of professionals, a guild, which has its own agenda and priorities? Have they a sense of solidarity provided by the sharing of a certain kind of know-how that enters into tension with the loyalty to a national agenda? And, if this exchange of information exists, as evidenced by the Snowden leaks, does it concur or not with the establishment of specific national security priorities? This article seeks to discuss the emergence of transnational groups based on a form of solidarity related to their daily work, their “artisanal craft,” or their “specific knowledge,” which often transcends differences in terms of national cultures. It will help to understand the complexity of forms of boundary-making in what has been called a “fracturing” world; the fracturing world being, here, a world full of transversal lines, of complex dynamics, yet not a disaggregated nor a broken world (Basaran et al. 2016). Certainly, for some researchers, it may appear so from the moment the image of state unity in decision-making is shaken; they fear the consequences of their empirical investigations and try to preserve the myth of nation-states alongside a level of rationality called the international society of states. However, if one pursues a more sociological and anthropological approach, the central element is then to understand how actors’ logic of practices in their everyday lives creates solidarity at …

Debates about border controls, migration status, mobility of persons and the eruption of political violence have evolved dramatically over the past decades. They have been colonised by a language o...

In the first section of this chapter, I analyze the current transformations of the definition, organization, and modalities of acquisition by which national security is delimited in different countries, and I argue that national security is no longer national as such, nor does it correspond to a traditional understanding of security as protection from war. This change in national security practices is what I call ‘the emergence of a digital reason of state’ based on the possibility for intelligence services to cooperate and compete to extend their goals of prevention of crime, terrorism or espionage by the inclusion of technologies collecting traces of human activities. This state of the game challenges the very idea of a ‘national’ security but this is not accepted or even acknowledged by security and intelligence studies. To understand nevertheless the structural changes, I propose in the second section to use the notion of field of struggles in a Bourdieusian sense in order to understand the battles between the actors that I called a transnational guild of the management of sensitive information, as well as the public controversies around the inevitability of large-scale surveillance. The positions of the field inform the struggles in terms of symbolic power between the actors and also the compliance of large parts of the public. The next element that I analyse in a third section is concerned with the forms of defiance and resistance against the power of these transnational guilds, that lawyers and judges or hackers try to put in motion, but which are often to some extent paralysed by the rapid acceptance that current technologies are inevitable and necessary. This form of doxa regarding the social effects of digital technologies impacts on the public at large and many academics, and reinforces a priori compliance, but is also generating alternative behaviours. DOI : 10.4337/9781785367724.00009

Comme l’a montré le numéro précédent, l’état d’urgence est un dispositif spécifique qui ne se réduit ni à une mesure technique d’un état de droit en train de subir une crise grave et temporaire, ni à un dispositif qui accompagne la justification d’un autoritarisme de l’exécutif se caractérisant par un régime d’exception qui se pérennise dans le temps et ne comporte plus qu’une façade démocratique. L’état d’urgence ou plutôt les différentes formes juridiques qui permettent à l’état d’urgence de créer un effet de cliquet transformant les règles de l’État de droit au bénéfice de l’exécutif et surtout de la police et des services de renseignement, et au détriment de la justice pénale et des affaires étrangères, articulent quatre phénomènes. Plutôt que de les fusionner trop vite dans un méta-discours de l’exception, il est préférable de distinguer ces quatre phénomènes en montrant leur hétérogénéité et les combinaisons possibles entre certaines configurations (mais pas d’autres)...