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Data presented in European Union documents have a social life of their own; they are collected, analyzed, disseminated, used, and reused. Along the way, data interact with different external elements—economic, social, and political actors, positions, and preferences—transforming their potential for different contexts and meanings. The Directorates-General are significant data actors, involved in both data-gathering and fact dissemination stages of data's social life and controlling the flows of data through the EU. This article focuses on the social life of two sets of data, tracing the evolution of these datasets into political discourses about disaster response and migration, and arguing that data never speak for themselves but rather evolve into facts through networks, which shape official policy discourses.

In this chapter Mark B. Salter, current editor of Security Dialogue, discusses with Can E. Mutlu the meaning and significance of technology for International Relations in light of his eclectic work. Salter, perhaps best-known for his dynamic presentations and engaging intellectual approach and recently for the two-volume project Making Things International, traces his engagement with technology across a vast field of contributions ranging from civilization in international politics, the genealogy of the modern passport, and critical security studies, touching on Foucauldian and Bourdieusian notions. In the conversation, Salter reflects on the recent material turn in IR and the expansion of this as a significant research area within critical consciousness in IR, with more and more people working on materiality, science and technology studies, actor-network theory. He points to the importance of remembering that we are not the first generation to experience this kind of epochal change, and that emancipatory change happens through engagement, and how technology is shaping the encounter with the Other—reminding us that scholarship can and should start with curiosity and intuition.

To represent the plurality of methods used within the Critical Studies Security community, this chapter surveys discourse analysis, corporeal analysis, ethnographic research, new materialism, and field analysis. Separating these practical methods from their ontological stakes makes critical analysis mutually intelligible and fosters a collobarative and plural discussion that shies away from doctrinaire orthodoxy. As a guide for analysis, this chapter also sets out some consensus positions about basic methods that are used in this field that critical scholars share and use in different theoretical traditions for their research design: idetifying standards of clarity, fit, and reflexivity by which critical scholarship can be judged, not on its ethical claims or its take on criticality, but rather on grounds of rigor.

The authors in this collective discussion engage, disaggregate and unpack the triangulation of security, technology and architecture, across a range of contemporary spaces/places. Reflecting diverse interdisciplinary commitments and perspectives, the collective discussion considers security, technology and architecture in urban environments and global/local interfaces, borders, borderlands and ports of entry, and even the sensorium, from soundscapes of the airport to teargas laden environments. From quotidian to high-tech, these interventions tease out the increasing ferocity of architecture and/in its relationship with technology and security. © The Authors 2016.

Developments in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will have a significant impact on the way we study international relations. Opportunities related to data processing and automated reasoning that emerge through developments in complex algorithms will inevitably generate a debate on research methods in social sciences. Algorithms provide novel and innovative ways to sort and make sense of digital data. Applications of ‘big data’ and its potential uses in the social sciences remain understudied in IR. The field has not fully picked up on the potential uses of algorithmic processing for research. This article looks at the ethical questions that arise from the use of algorithmic data processing and automated reasoning. In particular, the article asks whether there should be any ethical limitations on the ways we collect data to be processed by algorithms.

The question of research methods, and their role in the field, is a major source of contention for IR scholars. We can, however, discuss method, methodology, and innovation without revising or revisiting old debates. Methods do not have to be divisive, or disciplining. A frank discussion of research design, methods, and methodological preferences is essential to innovation and reproducibility. This intervention is a call for increased transparency in IR research outputs; IR theorists should not erase their own footprints from their publications and openly admit and discuss failures as productive moments in research. The act of disappearing, which has become the norm in the name of professionalised publications, robs the field of the productive pedagogical potential of research methods. The true impact of research rests in its pedagogical potential. As researchers, our job is thus to find a sensitive balance between not determining the outcome of the research from the get-go by making it all about our preferences and opinions, but also not making the impact of our preferences and opinions disappear completely. Building on this premise, this intervention discusses the significant pedagogical potential of research methods, reproducibility and discussion of failures in International Relations.

To advance the on-going debate on Securitisation Theory (ST), we argue that the important questions of audience and attention can be addressed through careful historical study. In an analysis of the securitising moves concerning the American military base on Diego Garcia, we are able to demonstrate that the Copenhagen and Paris Schools are not methodologically incompatible, and empirically that public attention for security issues has a tendency to dissipate without continual discursive investment.

Freezing is a common sign of panic, a response to accidents or events that overflow our capacity to react. Just as all civil airspace was cleared after the 9/11 attacks, the US-Canada border was also frozen, causing economic slowdowns. Border policies are caught between these two panics: security failures and economic crisis. To escape this paradox, American and Canadian authorities have implemented a series of security measures to make the border ‘smarter’, notably the implementation of biometric identity documents and surveillance by UAV Predator drones. Psychoanalytic theory can help us explain why the Canadian and American governments have invested so much money for so little evident or measurable increase in either security or economic flows. The article uses the notion of phantastic objects to explain these (over-)reactions to risk management at the US-Canada border.

This article focuses on the role of the European Union (EU) in the improvements in Georgia–Turkey cooperation. In particular, it examines how the EU's separate interactions with both Georgia and Turkey, under two different frameworks – accession negotiations and European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), respectively – have contributed to a de facto cooperation between two countries. While studying the cooperation in issue-areas such as energy, trade, taxation, transportation and mobility regimes, this article poses the question: Do the EU's international socialization projects such as the ENP and the enlargement process result in improved bilateral relations among countries participating in these programmes? Building upon a geopolitical interpretation of the ‘variable geometry’ model of European integration, this article argues that, while the EU, as an international agent, has managed to establish multiple spheres of attraction that reach beyond its external borders, these spheres of attraction have also cultivated the emergence of a complex interdependence structure.

In the past few years, the critical security studies field has witnessed the emergence of a debate on the role of methods.1 Along with our edited volume on Research Methods in Critical Security Stu...