Esmé Bosma – författare

This book analyses the challenges of secrecy in security research, and develops a set of methods to navigate, encircle and work with secrecy.How can researchers navigate secrecy in their fieldwork, when they encounter confidential material, closed-off quarters or bureaucratic rebuffs? This is a particular challenge for researchers in the security field, which is by nature secretive and difficult to access. This book creatively assesses and analyses the ways in which secrecies operate in security research. The collection sets out new understandings of secrecy, and shows how secrecy itself can be made productive to research analysis. It offers students, PhD researchers and senior scholars a rich toolkit of methods and best-practice examples for ethically appropriate ways of navigating secrecy. It pays attention to the balance between confidentiality, and academic freedom and integrity. The chapters draw on the rich qualitative fieldwork experiences of the contributors, who did research at a diversity of sites, for example at a former atomic weapons research facility, inside deportation units, in conflict zones, in everyday security landscapes, in virtual spaces and at borders, bureaucracies and banks.The book will be of interest to students of research methods, critical security studies and International Relations in general.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book analyses the challenges of secrecy in security research, and develops a set of methods to navigate, encircle and work with secrecy.How can researchers navigate secrecy in their fieldwork, when they encounter confidential material, closed-off quarters or bureaucratic rebuffs? This is a particular challenge for researchers in the security field, which is by nature secretive and difficult to access. This book creatively assesses and analyses the ways in which secrecies operate in security research. The collection sets out new understandings of secrecy, and shows how secrecy itself can be made productive to research analysis. It offers students, PhD researchers and senior scholars a rich toolkit of methods and best-practice examples for ethically appropriate ways of navigating secrecy. It pays attention to the balance between confidentiality, and academic freedom and integrity. The chapters draw on the rich qualitative fieldwork experiences of the contributors, who did research at a diversity of sites, for example at a former atomic weapons research facility, inside deportation units, in conflict zones, in everyday security landscapes, in virtual spaces and at borders, bureaucracies and banks.The book will be of interest to students of research methods, critical security studies and International Relations in general.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book analyses how banks implement counter-terrorist financing measures and experiment with technologies to assess risks and make security decisions.Banks have become private security actors. As “gatekeepers” of the financial system, they are legally obliged to conduct customer research and monitor bank accounts for unusual or suspicious transactions. Given the sheer volume of financial transactions that banks process daily, detection of financial crime heavily relies on digital security technologies that help analysts categorise and identify risky customers and financial transactions. Drawing from theories at the intersection of International Relations and Science and Technology Studies, the book advances the concept of ‘de-scription’ to offer a framework for analysing experimentation with security and digital technologies in practice. The research is based on fieldwork conducted in the financial crime sector in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It explores how political and ethical choices materialise at the human-technology interface and analyses the production of customer risk profiles, the design and use of transaction monitoring systems, and the emergence of public-private partnerships to counter terrorist financing.This book will be of interest to students and researchers in International Relations, Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Security Studies.