Examining questions of surveillance and policing in international relations invites us to engage in a conversation with surveillance studies. Lyon (2007) defines surveillance as: ‘Focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection, or direction.’ Effectively, this can mean any process that monitors behaviour for reasons other than idle curiosity (Lyon 2007). At its most expansive, the definition of surveillance encompasses surveillance for commercial reasons, in a corporate/managerial context, as a security act, or even within the context of the family – that is, surveillance of a spouse or child. Surveillance studies, however, also situates surveillance within the process of modern state-building, drawing on the work of Foucault (2019 [1975]). Beginning with early efforts by the state to collect data and track citizens – often, in the service of taxation or to monitor the spread of disease – surveillance studies sees continuity with the proliferation of surveillance in modern society. As a field, surveillance studies is interested in not only why this trajectory has unfolded as it has but also how systems, institutions, bureaucracies, and societies interact to create this landscape (Ball et al 2012). While technology development and computing power (especially, the rise of big data culture as discussed in Chapter 2) are important pieces of the puzzle in understanding the spread of surveillance, surveillance studies also takes an interest in exploring how the rise of corporate cultures, the diffusion of security threats (real or perceived), and permissive attitudes in society and government have facilitated the rise of surveillance (Ball et al 2012; Petersen 2012).

The types of questions asked in surveillance studies invite dialogue with both political science and feminist international relations. While surveillance studies has primarily been viewed as a sociological discipline, its inherent reflections on power dynamics necessarily make these topics political (Lyon 2007). Moreover, the differential impacts of surveillance systems or cultures on marginalized groups invite reflection about how gender, race, class, (dis) ability, sexuality, and other axes of difference play into discussions about surveillance. While gender is in its own right a useful topic of analysis, considering the new forms of insecurity that surveillance introduces for women, authors argue that a feminist approach to surveillance studies must be intersectional (Koskela 2012; Magnet and Dubrofsky 2015).