There is scientific consensus that an earthquake of a magnitude of at least 7 will soon occur on the North Anatolian Fault, which runs south of İstanbul. This earthquake would render one-fifth of İstanbul’s buildings uninhabitable, which means that approximately 200,000 buildings would be expected to suffer moderate or severe damage. As a part of preparedness for the anticipated earthquake, people in İstanbul are invited to have their buildings risk tested. This article, pivoting on cultural anthropology and science and technology studies, investigates how earthquake-proneness of buildings in İstanbul is technically and legally examined and determined. It ethnographically analyzes the risk assessments and demonstrates that the risk is enacted differently through distinctive engineering practices and legal regulations in different networks. When the two different risk assessment processes are examined in İstanbul, a building that is categorized as risky due to its earthquake vulnerability could be regarded as sturdy in the other assessment.

Why is the police role so broad in the United States today? Carceral state scholars have investigated how and why policymakers have treated so many social problems as policing problems, but they have not yet recognized the degree to which the call-for-service system has marginalized political control over police strategy. This Article traces the historical sources of this arrangement through extensive archival research into its evolution. We find that over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of new communications technologies gradually shifted the power to decide which problems are proper subjects of police attention to private individuals, eventually channeling their demands through centralized call centers that had been stripped of the authority and contextual knowledge needed to govern them in a meaningful way. That process fundamentally altered the character of public oversight over policing, elevating a distinctive set of individual interests as largely unchallenged determinants of the kinds of situations that are policeable. By illustrating how sociotechnical change unintentionally reallocated the authority to define the scope of an important institution’s mandate, this case sheds new light on the factors that shape the police role and the role the public plays in defining it.

This review essay looks at the plurality of research conducted today in the sociology of financial markets by examining a pioneering and little-known study - the PhD thesis of Ira Oscar Glick. It is indeed possible to find in this 1957 thesis some insights that are later solidified by several contemporary lines of research in the sociology of financial markets (new economic sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, Bourdieusian sociology, ethnomethodology, the economics of conventions). This rediscovery of a key author in the history of the field may lead us to reconsider his legacy and delve into a landmark work that potentially still harbors unexplored insights capable of opening up new avenues for research.

If Derrida once praised English for the richness of the expression “to enforce the law,” in this article I return the favor and embrace the ambiguity of the French word endroit. While it means nothing more than place, I suggest one could draw from Benjamin’s work on dwelling to ponder on the meaning of being within the spaces of 19th century (counter) revolutionary internationalism. In this vein, I read Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project—and, in particular, its analysis of the rise of iron & glass architecture that accompanied the conquering bourgeois and the persistent aristocracy—to analyze the new built environments of the fin de siècle North Atlantic diplomacy. Despite the growing interest in the history of global governance, for historians and critical legal scholars alike, the spatial dimension of “the international” have been a largely unexplored affair. Conversely, I suggest Benjamin’s insistence on the materiality of architecture reminds us that international law’s castles were not built solely in the air. In this vein, I suggest one can trace a material history of the spaces in which revolutionary and counterrevolutionary internationalisms struggled to fashion a shell for themselves during Europe’s turbulent 19th century.

‘Visual turn’ scholarship in International Relations (IR) acknowledges the importance of new information and communication technology for the production and circulation of images but lacks sustained engagement with the technologies themselves and how they interact with humans in the visual production of security. This article brings the visual turn into conversation with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and mobilises Latour and Woolgar’s notion of inscription to show how the production of visual artefacts and their security effects are conditioned by human/device interaction. It advances the argument that the representational force of a visual artefact is dependent not only on the content and quality of the artefact itself, but also on the specific human/device relations that condition its production. To illustrate this, the article theorises the smartphone as an inscription device and the selfie as an inscription practice and analyses the case of Zelensky’s selfie videos from the first few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Selfies inscribe meaning to security issues by mobilising the photographic affordances of indexicality, composition, and reflection in unique ways. Specifically, they focus images on the communicative acts of their producers and play on the relationship between human and device to invoke feelings of immediacy, authenticity, and intimacy.

After being kidnapped by the FARC-EP guerrilla group in 1994, the Colombian war reporter Herbin Hoyos created the radio show Las Voces del Secuestro (roughly, The Kidnapped Voices). Every morning, for 24 years, the families of those abducted by the guerrilla group sent out public messages of remembrance, hoping that their loved ones, deep in the jungles of Colombia, would be able to hear the broadcasts on their radios. Although the show closed in 2018, its legacy lives on, not only in the collective memory of many Colombians but also as an exhibition at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva (Switzerland). This article examines this show as a dispositif of power and knowledge that (re)produces a particular understanding of law, justice and memory. The show was used by far-right actors in Colombia to mobilise against the recent (2016) peace process – its crown jewel, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). As the JEP tackles the question of the FARC-EP kidnapping through its macro-case 01, the shadow of the Voces looms large over Colombia's transitional justice system. In the longest non-international armed conflict in Latin America, even radio waves served the continuation of war by other means.

The past decade has seen the rise of “data portals” as online devices for making data public. They have been accorded a prominent status in political speeches, policy documents, and official communications as sites of innovation, transparency, accountability, and participation. Drawing on research on data portals around the world, data portal software, and associated infrastructures, this paper explores three approaches for studying the social life of data portals as technopolitical devices: (a) interface analysis, (b) software analysis, and (c) metadata analysis. These three approaches contribute to the study of the social lives of data portals as dynamic, heterogeneous, and contested sites of public sector datafication. They are intended to contribute to critically assessing how participation around public sector datafication is invited and organized with portals, as well as to rethinking and recomposing them.

Open government and open data are often presented as the Asterix and Obelix of modern government—one cannot discuss one, without involving the other. Modern government, in this narrative, should open itself up, be more transparent, and allow the governed to have a say in their governance. The usage of technologies, and especially the communication of governmental data, is then thought to be one of the crucial instruments helping governments achieving these goals. Much open government data research, hence, focuses on the publication of open government data, their reuse, and re-users. Recent research trends, by contrast, divert from this focus on data and emphasize the importance of studying open government data in practice, in interaction with practitioners, while simultaneously paying attention to their political character. This commentary looks more closely at the implications of emphasizing the practical and political dimensions of open government data. It argues that researchers should explicate how and in what way open government data policies present solutions to what kind of problems. Such explications should be based on a detailed empirical analysis of how different actors do or do not do open data. The key question to be continuously asked and answered when studying and implementing open government data is how the solutions openness present latch onto the problem they aim to solve.

“The Question of Icebergs” is a cryo-history (Sörlin, 2015) of Arctic infrastructures: How has ice and snow shaped communication infrastructures in the Arctic by both drawing in and deterring interest in travelling through, connecting with and building in the region? This study follows the case of the 160-year-old plans for “The Northern Route,” a transatlantic telegraph which would have placed Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands at the centre of transatlantic communication in the early 1860s. I draw on Actor-Network Theory and postcolonial studies to trace how notions of the Arctic Sublime, a dependency on “credible ice witnesses,” local ice knowledges and the “politics of comparison” influenced the eventual abandonment of the route, where Arctic territories were (dis)regarded and considered as mere “substrate” for infrastructure. I argue that this cryo-history of Arctic telecommunication infrastructures is an essential contribution to a new socio-technical agenda in cable studies, which shows how established logics about who to connect, and where, still influence infrastructural development in the region today.

This article studies practices of knowledge production during counterterrorism financing court cases in European courts. Developments in international law have contributed to novel regulations to criminalise and prosecute the funding of terrorism in advance of terrorist violence. In this study, we study how court cases have become important spaces for contesting and evaluating multiple knowledge claims on terrorist threat and suspicion by analysing case proceedings from both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on recent debates in International Relations and postcolonial theory, we make two contributions. First, building on insights from postcolonial literature on ‘abyssal thinking’, we illustrate how legal practices differentiate between different ways of knowing by dismissing certain experiences as ‘emotional’ or ‘subjective’ in contrast to the assumed objectivity of other knowledge claims. We argue that decisions on what counts as knowledge in a court setting are situated in a specific sociopolitical setting, whereby particular knowledge and life-worlds are recognised at the expense of others. Second, we empirically show how the novel criminal laws shifts the responsibility to know terrorist threat from the state to ordinary citizens. We illustrate how the court reinforces new security logics where the state can entertain doubt, uncertainty, and trust in their practices, while the citizens cannot.

How do people know how – very practically speaking – to be violent? This article explores that question through a Science and Technology Studies perspective. It does so in order to go beyond the usual location of global political violence at a structural level that attributes its emergence principally to hierarchical orders, formal training, or deep cultural, political, or ideological factors. The alternative explanation offered here draws on Bruno Latour's concept of ‘plasma’ to sketch a theory of how practices of violence are embedded at a distributed ontological level through the historical accumulation of (popular) cultural, textual, technological, and other epistemic objects. In making that claim, I seek to stress how violent knowledge circulates outside the formal domains associated with it (the military, police) and is instead preconsciously accessible to each and every person. To support this argument, the article draws on empirical examples of the use of torture, including interviews conducted with Syrian perpetrators of torture, as well as by tracing the paradoxical entanglements between scientific practice and the practice of torture. I conclude by engaging the field of preventive medicine to speculate on the need to develop modes of violence prevention that appreciate political violence as a population-level sociopolitical problem.

This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation – something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising.

In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron’s operations in lowland Ecuador, the subject of a $9 billion judgment against the oil company. This article treats legal transcripts and depositions as examples of life writing to examine the contribution of experts to environmental litigation. It adds to recent scholarship on the instability of scientific authorship by comparing different forms of ghostwriting. Whereas the pharmaceutical industry employs ghostwriters to conceal the potentially harmful consequences of its products, the scientists contributing to the case against Chevron sought to make the company’s environmental impacts visible. The company undermined confidence in the legal proceedings in Ecuador by criticizing the experts for the plaintiffs rather than their data, preventing people whose lives and livelihoods have been affected by oil contamination from collecting the judgment against Chevron. This corporate strategy may have a chilling effect on the willingness of environmental scientists and other expert witnesses to provide evidence against powerful corporations. There is a need for better accounting of scientific research undertaken in support of environmental litigation, especially given the high stakes of legal contests like this one, in which corporate fortunes, human lives, and the fate of the environment are contingent on their technical expertise.

In the development and deployment of health and ageing innovations, underlying values such as privacy or quality of life are often seen as a relatively stable starting point, if considered at all. However, values are neither stable nor singular. This paper introduces a valuation framework to explore the co-constitution of values and technological innovations. A careful and ongoing reflection on values and valuation, in particular in innovation practices targeted at older people, is crucial when aiming to increase sustainable innovations. Therefore, we include a Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) perspective to technological development and innovation, to understand better the construction and co-constitution of ageing-in-place technologies. This framework is developed following a review of literature on values and valuation in the broad field of SSH. The proposed valuation framework consists of three core elements: (a) value multiplicity, (b) value dynamism, and (c) valuation implications. To demonstrate potential applicability of the framework, we conducted a thought experiment on values and valuation practices related to the development and potential further deployment of a COVID-19 health app in the Netherlands. This experiment pays special attention to multiple values at stake and implications for older adults who age in place. We argue this valuation framework provokes reflection on dynamic and multiple values underlying technology use and non-use, and contributes to responsible health and ageing innovations.

The COVID-19 pandemic confronts society with a dilemma between (in)visibility, security, and care. While invisibility might be sought by unregistered and undocumented people, being counted and thus visible during a pandemic is a precondition of existence and care. This article asks whether and how unregistered populations like undocumented migrants should be included in statistics and other “counting” exercises devised to track virus diffusion and its impact. In particular, the paper explores how such inclusion can be just, given that for unregistered people visibility is often associated with surveillance. It also reflects on how policymaking can act upon the relationship between data, visibility, and populations in pragmatic terms. Conversing with science and technology studies and critical data studies, the paper frames the dilemma between (in)visibility and care as an issue of sociotechnical nature and identifies four criteria linked to the sociotechnical characteristics of the data infrastructure enabling visibility. It surveys “counting” initiatives targeting unregistered and undocumented populations undertaken by European countries in the aftermath of the pandemic, and illustrates the medical, economic, and social consequences of invisibility. On the basis of our analysis, we outline four scenarios that articulate the visibility/invisibility binary in novel, nuanced terms, and identify in the “de facto inclusion” scenario the best option for both migrants and the surrounding communities. Finally, we offer policy recommendations to avoid surveillance and overreach and promote instead a more just “de facto” civil inclusion of undocumented populations.