Surveillance and democracy: Towards a new analytical language

Chapter 7 summarises the findings from the case studies and addresses the core questions posed at the outset of this book. In particular, the chapter assesses the extent to which surveillance and democracy can enact each other’s limits, by examining the controversies that arose in each case study, the extent to which each case study featured accountability and transparency, and the extent to which each surveillance practice had the scope to be co-produced. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a detailed consideration of surveillance through a participatory theory lens provokes the emergence of a new analytical language, a language that reconfigures surveillance scenarios and which highlights interests, stakes, controversy and negotiation in surveillance practices as they unfold at multiple levels. With this language, surveillance scholars can extend questions of discipline and control, of subjective alignment with institutions, of power and resistance on a sound, multi-level theoretical footing.