Rate My Professor Claudia Aradau

Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She serves as Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant SECURITY FLOWS (‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’), funded from 2019 to 2024. Her research develops a critical political analysis of security practices, examining how problems and people are constituted as objects and subjects of security and the implications for political subjectivity and democracy. Current work focuses on digital technologies reconfiguring security and surveillance, including algorithms and machine learning reshaping relations between security, democracy, and critique. The SECURITY FLOWS project investigates epistemic, political, and ethical implications of datafication in border security at the intersection of critical border and security studies, Science and Technology Studies, and data studies. A completed project, GUARDINT (‘Oversight and intelligence networks: Who guards the guardians?’), explored how digital surveillance normalizes and intangibilizes security-democracy relations. She co-authored Algorithmic Reason: The New Government of Self and Other (Oxford University Press, 2022) with Tobias Blanke, analyzing big data and algorithmic practices in making social and political problems knowable and governable. Other projects include Making digital non-citizens: identity, materiality and statelessness in Cambodia (Leverhulme Trust, 2023-2026) and Refugee Aid 3.0: Seeking Infrastructure Justice (ESRC, 2022-2023).

Aradau received the 2023 Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Political Sociology Section of the International Studies Association and the 2023 Best Book Award from the Science, Technology and Arts in International Relations Section for Algorithmic Reason. She spent a decade as associate editor and editor of Security Dialogue until 2018 and is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and editorial boards of Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology, and Politics. Key publications include Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown (Routledge, 2011, with Rens van Munster); ‘Experimentality, surplus data and the politics of debilitation in borderzones’ (Geopolitics, 2022); ‘The politics of non-knowledge at Europe’s borders: Errors, fakes and subjectivity’ (Review of International Studies, 2022, with Sarah Perret); and ‘Asylum, borders and the politics of violence: From suspicion to cruelty’ (Global Studies Quarterly, 2022, with Lucrezia Canzutti). She has designed modules on Critical Security Studies (BA) and Risk and Uncertainty in Global Politics (MA), served as programme director for the MA in International Conflict Studies, and welcomes PhD applications on critical engagements with security practices in the digital age, particularly border security and mass surveillance.