Infrastructural Power Europe? Database interoperability, statecraft and European security
The European Union has embraced the interoperability imperative. There are multiple initiatives aiming at facilitating access across diverse databases – from the creation of several European Data Spaces to the design of ad hoc mechanisms of interconnection. However, interoperability remains a major challenge, whose (slow) implementation itself deserves as much scholarly attention as the introduction of disruptive. Innovations. DATAUNION, our ERC project, explores the making of a European Data Union through a focus on ongoing interoperability projects in the field of European security. As security practice is often understood as part of the kernel of state or state-like authority, it offers us a good case to explore the nexus between interoperability and statecraft. Building upon the conceptual, methodological and analytical work carried during DATAUNION first phases, this presentation proposes to grasp the interoperability imperative and its slow implementation through the lens of what we could call Infrastructural Power Europe, resituating this approach in relation to scholarly literatures across European studies, Science and Technology Studies and Media Theory.
Speaker: Rocco Bellanova, Research Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel – in the interdisciplinary research group Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) - and the PI of the ERC project DATAUNION.
Introduction: Francesco Nicoli (Lecturer in Political Science, Politecnico di Torino)