Matthias Leese
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 141201 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Matthias Leese |
| PRENOMES | Matthias |
| SOBRENOME | Leese |
| ASSINATURA | LEESE M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | ETH Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7153-7783 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 215 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2014 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The Shifting Sands of Digital Transformation
International Political Sociology (IPS) needs to engage digital transformation, loosely defined as how digital technologies become part of and re-shape social and political practices, structures, and relationships. We argue that digital transformation is seldom fixed or complete. Rather, it is subject to ongoing mutations and adjustments, based on technological advancements and idiosyncrasies as much as on political programs, struggles, and evolv…
Adding Government to Proof
This paper engages how crime analysts turn “ill-structured” reports into “good,” analyzable data. Based on qualitative field research in a police department, the empirical analysis retraces the manual labor that is necessary to navigate the conflicting informational requirements of the criminal justice system and aggregate analytics. Building on Desrosières’ concept of the duality of data as both “proof” and “government,” the paper explicates how…
Changes to the publication model
AI and academic publishing
Benchmarking and Provenance
This article investigates the politics of data trust in European Union (EU) internal security, where large-scale databases are increasingly central to intelligence production, administrative coordination, and intervention capabilities. Amid growing concerns about data quality, the paper examines the political strategies through which trust in data is being constructed and operationalized. Drawing on a relational understanding of trust, and based …
Politics of creep
The Schengen Information System for law enforcement, border control, and judicial cooperation in the European Union has over the years seen a considerable expansion of the amount and types of data stored and its functionalities, as well as its user base. In light of this transformation from a simple information-sharing tool to a full-blown investigative database, there has, however, been surprisingly little public debate and pushback against the …
Staying in control of technology
This article engages the question how police departments internally delegitimize the use of private sector technology vis-à-vis democratic considerations. Specifically, it retraces argumentation around the discontinuation of commercial predictive policing software and the alternative development of in-house tools. Conceptually, the analysis builds on the notion of digital sovereignty that has more recently become a popular analytical trope vis-à-…
Epistemic fusion
This article focuses on the control of international mobility through the gathering, processing, and sharing of air travellers’ data. While a lot has been written about pre-emptive rationalities of security translated into the functionalities of IT systems used for border controls, we take a step further and investigate how these rationalities are operationalised through data transfer, screening, validation, discarding, profiling, contextualisati…
Not so fast! Data temporalities in law enforcement and border control
In this paper, we investigate the temporal implications of data in law enforcement and border control. We start from the assumption that the velocity of knowledge and action is defined by heterogeneous formations and interactions of various actors, sites, and materials. To analyze these formations and interactions, we introduce and unpack the concept of "data temporality." Data temporality explicates how the speed of knowledge and action in dataf…
Expanding boundaries
This paper empirically retraces and conceptualizes secrecy in the study of security. Building on 27 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with social scientists about their field research experiences, we use Gieryn’s concept of “boundary work” to rethink secrecy not as a self-evident separator between clearly demarcated spheres but as something that is negotiated, suspended, or circumvented in social situations. A boundary perspective allows us…
Enacting criminal futures
This paper analyzes how in predictive policing, data ‘make’ criminal futures that can be subjected to crime prevention. In doing so, it shows that the production of specific accounts of the future is predicated on the data practices of police departments. Specifically, the analysis identifies two sets of data practices that play a key role in how predictive policing brings specific criminal futures into being and renders them amenable to crime pr…
Fixing State Vision
Building on Scott’s notion of identity as a key concept in early modern statehood, this paper historically contextualises and analyses the current political re-problematisation of identity in the EU. Engaging the recently adopted interoperability initiative that is set to biometrically verify and cross-validate identity records between all European border management, migration, and security databases, it argues that interoperability presents a sh…
Data Matters
Data matter more than ever in the regulation of borders and migration. An apt illustration of how movement is enabled or restricted by data collection and analytics was recently reported by Eyal We
Security as Socio‐Technical Practice
Predictive policing is among the most prevalent new technological tools for law enforcement. Understanding how the police produce knowledge about crime and society in technologically mediated ways is important vis‐a‐vis practices of social ordering. In this paper, I suggest to draw on literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to understand the impact of technology not as analytically isolated artefact, but as embedded in socio…
Criminal Futures
This book explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as…
Science, technology, security
Science and technology play a central role in the contemporary governance of security, both as tools for the production of security and as objects of security concern. Scholars are increasingly seeking to not only critically reflect on the interplays between science, technology and security, but also engage with the practices of security communities that shape and are shaped by science and technology. To further help this growth of interest in se…
Criminal Futures
Technology and Agency in International Relations
Predictive Policing and the Politics of Patterns
Patterns are the epistemological core of predictive policing. With the move towards digital prediction tools, the authority of the pattern is rearticulated and reinforced in police work. Based on empirical research about predictive policing software and practices, this article puts the authority of patterns into perspective. Introducing four ideal-typical styles of pattern identification, we illustrate that patterns are not based on a singular lo…
Putting critique to work
In this article, we examine the possibility of exercising critique through the mandatory ethical coverage that EU security research projects must be subjected to. Applied ethics, so we argue, speaks to several core issues in the critical security studies agenda, such as turning abstract considerations of critique into forms of tangible cooperation, engaging exoteric communities, and placing normative questions about security within concrete conte…
The new mobilities paradigm and critical security studies
The rapid expansion of academic research on mobilities is evident in disciplines such as geography, sociology, performance studies, media studies, history, and literary studies, but how inter- or multi-disciplinary are the research programs, questions, and dialogues being explored? Are scholars from these different disciplines engaging in meaningful two-way dialogues with each other, and are they developing shared research agendas
Standardizing security
This paper discusses the role of standards and standardization in the regulation of security and mobility through the EU’s Mandate M/487 and biometric Automated Border Control (ABC) systems. It argues that the choice for facial recognition as the standard biometric modality was largely pre-configured through the inertia of sedimented infrastructures, and that the restructuring of the EU external borders in the case of ABC therefore to a certain e…
Security/ Mobility
The power of cyberspace centralisation: analysing the example of
Prevention, knowledge, justice
This article explores questions of justice and moral permissibility of state action in counterterrorism through Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Using the case of the Berlin attack in December of 2016 and the ensuing political debate over whether potential terrorists could be put into preventive custody as an illustrative example, it engages Nozick’s argument on prevention, knowledge and justice. In Nozick’s fierce defence of individua…
Security/Mobility
Mobility and security are key themes for students of international politics that assume a globalized world. This book brings together research that looks into the political regulation of movement with research that engages the material enablers of and constraints on such movement. The setup of the book explores overlaps between critical security studies and political geography in order to bridge the gap between disciplines that study aspects of g…
The new profiling
This article argues that with increasingly large databases and computational power, profiling as a key part of security governance is experiencing major changes. Targeting mobile populations in order to enact security via controlling and sifting the good from the bad, profiling techniques accumulate and process personal data. However, as advanced algorithmic analytics enable authorities to make sense of unprecedented amounts of information and de…
Data Matters
Data matter more than ever in the regulation of borders and migration. An apt illustration of how movement is enabled or restricted by data collection and analytics was recently reported by Eyal We
Fixing State Vision
Building on Scott’s notion of identity as a key concept in early modern statehood, this paper historically contextualises and analyses the current political re-problematisation of identity in the EU. Engaging the recently adopted interoperability initiative that is set to biometrically verify and cross-validate identity records between all European border management, migration, and security databases, it argues that interoperability presents a sh…
Science, technology, security
Science and technology play a central role in the contemporary governance of security, both as tools for the production of security and as objects of security concern. Scholars are increasingly seeking to not only critically reflect on the interplays between science, technology and security, but also engage with the practices of security communities that shape and are shaped by science and technology. To further help this growth of interest in se…
Exploring the Security/Facilitation Nexus
This article critically engages the ongoing efforts of establishing a Registered Traveller Programme (RTP), as part of the Smart Borders Package, at the EU level. As the RTP seeks to flexibilise border management through the notions of risk and trustworthiness, the article suggests that a Foucauldian account of biopolitics can serve as a capable analytical tool. A biopolitical approach conceptualises the RTP's aims of business facilitation and bo…
Predictive Policing and the Politics of Patterns
Patterns are the epistemological core of predictive policing. With the move towards digital prediction tools, the authority of the pattern is rearticulated and reinforced in police work. Based on empirical research about predictive policing software and practices, this article puts the authority of patterns into perspective. Introducing four ideal-typical styles of pattern identification, we illustrate that patterns are not based on a singular lo…
The new mobilities paradigm and critical security studies
The rapid expansion of academic research on mobilities is evident in disciplines such as geography, sociology, performance studies, media studies, history, and literary studies, but how inter- or multi-disciplinary are the research programs, questions, and dialogues being explored? Are scholars from these different disciplines engaging in meaningful two-way dialogues with each other, and are they developing shared research agendas
Putting critique to work
In this article, we examine the possibility of exercising critique through the mandatory ethical coverage that EU security research projects must be subjected to. Applied ethics, so we argue, speaks to several core issues in the critical security studies agenda, such as turning abstract considerations of critique into forms of tangible cooperation, engaging exoteric communities, and placing normative questions about security within concrete conte…
We were taken by surprise
This paper analyzes how body scanners were implemented at German airports in 2014 after failing a preliminary trial run in 2010–2011. The paper retraces how this initial failure became possible. It highlights the different ways of framing failure at both the political level and by experts and stakeholders from aviation security and the security industry. In both cases, although with reference to different claims (numbers and operational capacity …
Security as Socio‐Technical Practice
Predictive policing is among the most prevalent new technological tools for law enforcement. Understanding how the police produce knowledge about crime and society in technologically mediated ways is important vis‐a‐vis practices of social ordering. In this paper, I suggest to draw on literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to understand the impact of technology not as analytically isolated artefact, but as embedded in socio…
Humor at the Airport? Visualization, Exposure, and Laughter in the 'War on Terror
With the emergence of aviation as a target for terrorism and serious crime in the 1970s, the affective dimension of airport security changed drastically and is now carefully engineered as a zone of earnest and solemn protocol. Against a backdrop of bombings and hijackings, airport security today enacts a "no bullshit" approach to the "war on terror." Humor has essentially been banned from screening operations. From signs reading "No bomb jokes, p…
Epistemic fusion
This article focuses on the control of international mobility through the gathering, processing, and sharing of air travellers’ data. While a lot has been written about pre-emptive rationalities of security translated into the functionalities of IT systems used for border controls, we take a step further and investigate how these rationalities are operationalised through data transfer, screening, validation, discarding, profiling, contextualisati…
Standardizing security
This paper discusses the role of standards and standardization in the regulation of security and mobility through the EU’s Mandate M/487 and biometric Automated Border Control (ABC) systems. It argues that the choice for facial recognition as the standard biometric modality was largely pre-configured through the inertia of sedimented infrastructures, and that the restructuring of the EU external borders in the case of ABC therefore to a certain e…
Security/Mobility
Mobility and security are key themes for students of international politics that assume a globalized world. This book brings together research that looks into the political regulation of movement with research that engages the material enablers of and constraints on such movement. The setup of the book explores overlaps between critical security studies and political geography in order to bridge the gap between disciplines that study aspects of g…
Politics of creep
The Schengen Information System for law enforcement, border control, and judicial cooperation in the European Union has over the years seen a considerable expansion of the amount and types of data stored and its functionalities, as well as its user base. In light of this transformation from a simple information-sharing tool to a full-blown investigative database, there has, however, been surprisingly little public debate and pushback against the …
Not so fast! Data temporalities in law enforcement and border control
In this paper, we investigate the temporal implications of data in law enforcement and border control. We start from the assumption that the velocity of knowledge and action is defined by heterogeneous formations and interactions of various actors, sites, and materials. To analyze these formations and interactions, we introduce and unpack the concept of "data temporality." Data temporality explicates how the speed of knowledge and action in dataf…
Enacting criminal futures
This paper analyzes how in predictive policing, data ‘make’ criminal futures that can be subjected to crime prevention. In doing so, it shows that the production of specific accounts of the future is predicated on the data practices of police departments. Specifically, the analysis identifies two sets of data practices that play a key role in how predictive policing brings specific criminal futures into being and renders them amenable to crime pr…
Governing airport security between the market and the public good
Airport security is increasingly governed in liberal ways, allowing for flexibilized and marketized ways of outsourcing and contracting service provisions to the private sector. This article draws on expert interviews from the aviation sector, finding that liberal security governance at German airports enables public bodies not only to cut costs through competitive tendering practices, but also to re-locate accountability for security provision t…
AI and academic publishing
The new profiling
This article argues that with increasingly large databases and computational power, profiling as a key part of security governance is experiencing major changes. Targeting mobile populations in order to enact security via controlling and sifting the good from the bad, profiling techniques accumulate and process personal data. However, as advanced algorithmic analytics enable authorities to make sense of unprecedented amounts of information and de…
Governing airport security between the market and the public good
Airport security is increasingly governed in liberal ways, allowing for flexibilized and marketized ways of outsourcing and contracting service provisions to the private sector. This article draws on expert interviews from the aviation sector, finding that liberal security governance at German airports enables public bodies not only to cut costs through competitive tendering practices, but also to re-locate accountability for security provision t…
We were taken by surprise
This paper analyzes how body scanners were implemented at German airports in 2014 after failing a preliminary trial run in 2010–2011. The paper retraces how this initial failure became possible. It highlights the different ways of framing failure at both the political level and by experts and stakeholders from aviation security and the security industry. In both cases, although with reference to different claims (numbers and operational capacity …
Humor at the Airport? Visualization, Exposure, and Laughter in the 'War on Terror
With the emergence of aviation as a target for terrorism and serious crime in the 1970s, the affective dimension of airport security changed drastically and is now carefully engineered as a zone of earnest and solemn protocol. Against a backdrop of bombings and hijackings, airport security today enacts a "no bullshit" approach to the "war on terror." Humor has essentially been banned from screening operations. From signs reading "No bomb jokes, p…
Exploring the Security/Facilitation Nexus
This article critically engages the ongoing efforts of establishing a Registered Traveller Programme (RTP), as part of the Smart Borders Package, at the EU level. As the RTP seeks to flexibilise border management through the notions of risk and trustworthiness, the article suggests that a Foucauldian account of biopolitics can serve as a capable analytical tool. A biopolitical approach conceptualises the RTP's aims of business facilitation and bo…
Security/ Mobility
The power of cyberspace centralisation: analysing the example of
Prevention, knowledge, justice
This article explores questions of justice and moral permissibility of state action in counterterrorism through Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Using the case of the Berlin attack in December of 2016 and the ensuing political debate over whether potential terrorists could be put into preventive custody as an illustrative example, it engages Nozick’s argument on prevention, knowledge and justice. In Nozick’s fierce defence of individua…
Security/Mobility
Mobility and security are key themes for students of international politics that assume a globalized world. This book brings together research that looks into the political regulation of movement with research that engages the material enablers of and constraints on such movement. The setup of the book explores overlaps between critical security studies and political geography in order to bridge the gap between disciplines that study aspects of g…
Putting critique to work
In this article, we examine the possibility of exercising critique through the mandatory ethical coverage that EU security research projects must be subjected to. Applied ethics, so we argue, speaks to several core issues in the critical security studies agenda, such as turning abstract considerations of critique into forms of tangible cooperation, engaging exoteric communities, and placing normative questions about security within concrete conte…
The new mobilities paradigm and critical security studies
The rapid expansion of academic research on mobilities is evident in disciplines such as geography, sociology, performance studies, media studies, history, and literary studies, but how inter- or multi-disciplinary are the research programs, questions, and dialogues being explored? Are scholars from these different disciplines engaging in meaningful two-way dialogues with each other, and are they developing shared research agendas
Standardizing security
This paper discusses the role of standards and standardization in the regulation of security and mobility through the EU’s Mandate M/487 and biometric Automated Border Control (ABC) systems. It argues that the choice for facial recognition as the standard biometric modality was largely pre-configured through the inertia of sedimented infrastructures, and that the restructuring of the EU external borders in the case of ABC therefore to a certain e…
Technology and Agency in International Relations
Predictive Policing and the Politics of Patterns
Patterns are the epistemological core of predictive policing. With the move towards digital prediction tools, the authority of the pattern is rearticulated and reinforced in police work. Based on empirical research about predictive policing software and practices, this article puts the authority of patterns into perspective. Introducing four ideal-typical styles of pattern identification, we illustrate that patterns are not based on a singular lo…
Criminal Futures
This book explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as…
Science, technology, security
Science and technology play a central role in the contemporary governance of security, both as tools for the production of security and as objects of security concern. Scholars are increasingly seeking to not only critically reflect on the interplays between science, technology and security, but also engage with the practices of security communities that shape and are shaped by science and technology. To further help this growth of interest in se…
Criminal Futures
Security as Socio‐Technical Practice
Predictive policing is among the most prevalent new technological tools for law enforcement. Understanding how the police produce knowledge about crime and society in technologically mediated ways is important vis‐a‐vis practices of social ordering. In this paper, I suggest to draw on literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to understand the impact of technology not as analytically isolated artefact, but as embedded in socio…
Expanding boundaries
This paper empirically retraces and conceptualizes secrecy in the study of security. Building on 27 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with social scientists about their field research experiences, we use Gieryn’s concept of “boundary work” to rethink secrecy not as a self-evident separator between clearly demarcated spheres but as something that is negotiated, suspended, or circumvented in social situations. A boundary perspective allows us…
Enacting criminal futures
This paper analyzes how in predictive policing, data ‘make’ criminal futures that can be subjected to crime prevention. In doing so, it shows that the production of specific accounts of the future is predicated on the data practices of police departments. Specifically, the analysis identifies two sets of data practices that play a key role in how predictive policing brings specific criminal futures into being and renders them amenable to crime pr…
Fixing State Vision
Building on Scott’s notion of identity as a key concept in early modern statehood, this paper historically contextualises and analyses the current political re-problematisation of identity in the EU. Engaging the recently adopted interoperability initiative that is set to biometrically verify and cross-validate identity records between all European border management, migration, and security databases, it argues that interoperability presents a sh…
Data Matters
Data matter more than ever in the regulation of borders and migration. An apt illustration of how movement is enabled or restricted by data collection and analytics was recently reported by Eyal We
Epistemic fusion
This article focuses on the control of international mobility through the gathering, processing, and sharing of air travellers’ data. While a lot has been written about pre-emptive rationalities of security translated into the functionalities of IT systems used for border controls, we take a step further and investigate how these rationalities are operationalised through data transfer, screening, validation, discarding, profiling, contextualisati…
Not so fast! Data temporalities in law enforcement and border control
In this paper, we investigate the temporal implications of data in law enforcement and border control. We start from the assumption that the velocity of knowledge and action is defined by heterogeneous formations and interactions of various actors, sites, and materials. To analyze these formations and interactions, we introduce and unpack the concept of "data temporality." Data temporality explicates how the speed of knowledge and action in dataf…
Politics of creep
The Schengen Information System for law enforcement, border control, and judicial cooperation in the European Union has over the years seen a considerable expansion of the amount and types of data stored and its functionalities, as well as its user base. In light of this transformation from a simple information-sharing tool to a full-blown investigative database, there has, however, been surprisingly little public debate and pushback against the …
Staying in control of technology
This article engages the question how police departments internally delegitimize the use of private sector technology vis-à-vis democratic considerations. Specifically, it retraces argumentation around the discontinuation of commercial predictive policing software and the alternative development of in-house tools. Conceptually, the analysis builds on the notion of digital sovereignty that has more recently become a popular analytical trope vis-à-…
Political science (21 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras) · Global Security and Public Health (15 obras) · Politics (12 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Computer security (9 obras) · Business (8 obras) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (7 obras)