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Título: A WORLD MADE OF APPS?: ALGORITHMS AND (IN)SECURITY GOVERNANCE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Autor: LUISA CRUZ LOBATO
Colaborador(es): ANNA GUDRUN CHRISTINA LEANDER - Orientador
Catalogação: 31/JAN/2022 Língua(s): ENGLISH - UNITED STATES
Tipo: TEXT Subtipo: THESIS
Notas: [pt] Todos os dados constantes dos documentos são de inteira responsabilidade de seus autores. Os dados utilizados nas descrições dos documentos estão em conformidade com os sistemas da administração da PUC-Rio.
[en] All data contained in the documents are the sole responsibility of the authors. The data used in the descriptions of the documents are in conformity with the systems of the administration of PUC-Rio.
Referência(s): [pt] https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/projetosEspeciais/ETDs/consultas/conteudo.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=57227&idi=1
[en] https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/projetosEspeciais/ETDs/consultas/conteudo.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=57227&idi=2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17771/PUCRio.acad.57227
Resumo:
This work looks at how apps enact insecurity in/of the Global South in order to understand the algorithmic mediation of security governance. Apps are manifestations of computation whose power resides in their proximity with endusers and alleged democratizing and empowering roles. At the same time, however, apps are embedded into and replicate complicated geopolitics of knowledge that cannot be understood by what I characterize as non-monstrous forms of IR theorizing, which, wittingly or not, re-enact the containment of authority within the categories of the individual, the state and the international system. In contrast, monstrous forms of theorizing, such as those which attempt to account for the politics of (digital) artifacts and sociomateriality, disturb disciplinary boundaries, assumptions and representations of politics in order to expand and extend what is encompassed as the political and the authoritative. While engaging with efforts to account for the politics of both in security governance, this thesis argues that apps add layers of complication to our understanding of governance, of which I will be dealing with three: simplification, formalism and objectivity. In a second argumentative thrust, the thesis argues that these three layers are also logics of computation that give form to an app s authority, but not without being significantly transformed and repurposed in practice. To the extent that apps decisively embody both stories of democratic politics and unequal geopolitics of knowledge, we must acknowledge that practical questions pertaining to their governance work traverse the Global South, understood both as a category of thought about postcolonial entanglements and interactions traversed by digital technologies and a marker of knowledge hierarchies. This thesis, therefore, provides an alternative account of the interplays of power and authority in global (South) security politics. With this, the work moves away from abstract theorizing to look at computational governance on the ground, that is to say, in the sociopolitical contexts in which they operate, are designed, created and adapted. While doing so, it engages in empirical philosophy grounded on the use of ethnographic methods and an anthropophagic use of concepts developed by IR scholars, philosophers of technology, STS and digital politics scholars and philosophers and sociologists writing about power and inequality. Fieldwork was conducted between 2018 and 2021 with three security apps: Fogo Cruzado, EagleView 2.0, and UN SanctionsApp, and involves a collage of methods, ranging from participant observations, interviews, app walkthroughs and bibliographical research. This messy combination of methods, objects and places cannot be seen as untangled from the broader conceptual thrust of the thesis, namely, that it is in and through the work of apps as authoritative components of governance in/of the Global South, that we can start to embrace the monsters that have been terrifying security politics for so long. And if we do so, we might finally be able to open authority to its processual, transversal, and manifold enactments through computation, itself understood as a situated, adaptable and contextual set of practices, which both reproduce and complicate knowledge hierarchies.
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