Summary:

INFRASEC examines how algorithmic infrastructures transform international security governance. Focusing on large-scale processing of Advance Passenger Information (API) and Passenger Name Records (PNR), it investigates how international actors design, implement, and scale algorithmic systems that produce actionable security knowledge. While existing scholarship has addressed anticipatory logics and risk-based rationalities in algorithmic security, the concrete organizational, computational, and governance processes behind these infrastructures remain understudied. INFRASEC introduces the concept of "algorithmic infrastructuring" to study infrastructures as open-ended processes. Through a comparative analysis of the EU and the UN, the project combines expert interviews, participant observation, document and interface analysis, digital mapping, and qualitative comparative analysis, thus systematically exploring how different institutional configurations produce divergent security practices. By shifting attention from infrastructures-as-objects to infrastructures-as-processes, INFRASEC advances debates on digital sovereignty, epistemic infrastructures, and democratic governance.    

Contacts:

Internal:

Matthias Leese

Research Areas:

• Digital Public Governance

Transversal Research Priorities:

• Digitalisierung

Keywords:

• algorithms
• data
• security
• infrastructure