Today, we share data about ourselves almost constantly – often without realising it. At borders, data collection has intensified: migrants are identified, asylum applications are processed, and refugee status is granted or refused based on vast amounts of data. More and more actors collect and exchange this data. But what does this increased reliance on data mean for how borders are governed and secured? And what are the consequences for migrants themselves? What do these wide-ranging transformations mean for societies at large? The SECURITY FLOWS project investigates these political and social implications of these transformations. It asks how data affects decision-making, accountability, and access to rights – not just for migrants, but for all of us.
Why is it important for society?
Despite the growing importance of data, we still know too little about how data is collected, how it is used and by whom, and how it moves. While scholars have started to investigate specific institutions and databases, there has been no systematic research following the data to understand how data moves and changes as people move across social and political spaces. We still lack an understanding of the far-reaching consequences that data has for decision-making at borders, democratic accountability, migrants and citizens, and their fundamental rights. Wrong, mistaken or missing data can have serious consequences, especially for vulnerable people who do not have the financial and material resources to rectify mistakes, challenge errors, and enforce data protection and other rights. These are important questions for everyone who is wondering how the data they give – whether they are aware of it or not – can affect their lives, their rights and their participation in society.
What are the overall objectives?
The SECURITY FLOWS project explores how data is reshaping border security and what this means for people on the move, as well as for society more broadly. It is focused on four key objectives:
i) The project aims to rethink relations between data and knowledge in border governance and security. It challenges the idea that data automatically leads to knowledge. Instead, it shows that data can often obscure, obfuscate and disorient. The project analyses how knowing and not knowing are produced and shared among the many actors involved in border governance.
ii) The project proposes to develop an experimental multi-modal methodology of ‘following the data’ to analyse how data flows in practice, which forms of data are more amenable to movement, and which frictions emerge along the way. Using a combination of textual, archival, ethnographic and digital methods, the project traces the complex movements of data along the Eastern, Central and Western Mediterranean routes.
iii) As capacities of data collection, processing and exchange grow, they transform power relations between actors. Some actors become more central to border security, while others are pushed to the margins or even made invisible. The project examines how data changes decision-making and reshapes power relations between different actors, including migrants themselves.
iv)The project explores the ethical consequences of these wide-ranging transformations, especially for data protection and rights. It focuses on three key areas: who is accountable, how rights are upheld and how citizens and non-citizens alike can exercise agency in data-driven societies.
