Projects - Ongoing

Project Title - The European Data Union: European Security Integration through Database Interoperability

Keywords - security, freedom, justice, cooperation

This project studies the construction of a European Data Union, focusing on the operational implementation of database interoperability across the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. If the set-up of large-scale databases has already proven crucial to shape and further European security cooperation, the ongoing efforts to integrate data and make them available across borders and boundaries beg the question of how database interoperability rearranges power relations.

Hence, the DATAUNION project will pursue four objectives: 

(1) Theorizing the socio-material practices that underpin database interoperability through the innovative notion of security tinkering, defined as the processes through which conflicts and solutions related to database interoperability are addressed, dodged or solved; 

(2) Developing a ground-breaking multi-modal approach bringing Critical Making Practices to the study of security practices in order to retrace how database interoperability is implemented on the ground; 

(3) Delivering new empirical knowledge on the processes and challenges of all three main European interoperability initiatives, and how they shape the future of European security integration; and 

(4) Evaluating the ethico-political implications of the construction of the European Data Union.