Promises & Pitfalls of Activist-Researcher Collaborations

In late January, I took a train up North to attend a conference on predictive policing organized at the IT University of Copenhagen. This international gathering brought together researchers working on the transformation of police surveillance in the digital age, with a particular focus on predictive policing.

Predictive policing in France

Together with Edlira Nano (who sadly could not make the trip), we presented an overview of predictive policing in France titled “From Myth-Making to Quiet Dereliction”.

Our analysis traces the media emergence of these technologies in France, from the spectacular announcements by the Gendarmerie nationale around the PAVED tool to the more discreet deployments of tools like EDICIA’s Smart Police among municipal police forces. We documented how, behind the myth of a police force “augmented” by artificial intelligence, lie systems that are often rudimentary, opaque, whose effectiveness remains largely unproven, but that entrench discriminatory police practice.

The analysis also reveals a paradoxical double movement: on one side, a relative abandonment of the most ambitious projects in the face of controversies and technical limitations; on the other, massive investments that continue to fuel the security sector, feeding the promise of a 21st-century “scientific policing”.

Researcher-activist collaborations

As part of a panel dedicated to civil society, I also presented the Technopolice project as an example of research-action against new police surveillance technologies. This intervention revisited the genesis of the project in 2018-2019, our working methods (FOIA requests, collaborative documentation, Uwazi database, public forum), and above all the tensions and synergies that can emerge between activists and researchersworking alongside.

The benefits of collaboration

One of the key arguments I developed was how activist resources and documentation can empower researchers and journalists to work on these issues. The politicization of surveillance technologies, far from being an obstacle to research, can actually serve as an enabler, creating the political space and urgency needed to investigate these systems critically.

Methodologically, activists and researchers bring complementary strengths. Activists are not constrained by the same institutional frameworks and can resort to more “adversarial methods” that would struggle to pass an ethics committee review — e.g. using FOIA requests aggressively, crowdsourcing surveillance infrastructure mapping, or setting up secure dropboxes for whistleblowers. These approaches have proven essential for documenting systems that institutions deliberately keep opaque.

In turn, activists benefit enormously from academic rigor. Researchers provide thorough literature reviews, theoretical frameworks, and peer review that strengthen advocacy work. They can point us toward key research that helps build more robust oppositional arguments. I also noted that while established researchers often face the same institutional opacity as activists, more junior and daring researchers more often manage to obtain impressive access — perhaps because they’re less embedded in institutional networks and not seen as threatening.

Challenges and tensions in action-research

However, I was careful to also address the significant challenges these collaborations face. The presentation sparked discussion around several tensions:

• Conflicting temporalities: It is perhaps the most persistent friction. Academic research often requires long-term data collection and analysis, while activists need to release information quickly to respond to political opportunities or prevent harmful deployments. This temporal mismatch can create frustration on both sides.

• The paradox of politicization: While political controversy can open up research opportunities, it can also reinforce institutional secrecy. Already opaque and secretive institutions may close off even further when they perceive activists and critical researchers as threats rather than neutral observers.

• Structural inequalities: Too often, precarious and unpaid activists end up helping well-resourced researchers who may be less interested in social change.

• Objectification: Activists can be “studied” as “actors in the controversy.” Sometimes their trust and openness give way to an uncomfortable feeling of being research-objectified, seeing their strategies, internal debates, and even failures turned into academic material without adequate reciprocity or care for how this affects their organizing.

To kickstart the discussion, I suggested several pathways forward. Being upfront and laying out the framework for collaboration early on seems essential—establishing clear expectations, boundaries, and commitments before work begins.

I also addressed a more structural question: in a context of growing liberal authoritarianism, will increased funding for the “third sector” of research really benefit activist groups? Or might it create new forms of co-optation and institutional control over critical work? This question felt particularly urgent given recent European funding initiatives that claim to support civil society research while potentially instrumentalizing it for state purposes.

A dynamic research community

Beyond these presentations, the conference demonstrated the vitality of critical research on algorithmic policing, with contributions from across Europe and beyond. Work on criminal databases in India, Palantir’s use in Europe, biometric surveillance in the UK, and some archival research on Norwegian tech-policing significantly broadened perspectives on these issues.

The two keynotes by Sarah Brayne (University of Texas) and Simon Egbert (Bielefeld University) also provided stimulating theoretical frameworks for thinking through contemporary mutations in police work in the face of datafication and automation.

This gathering confirms the importance of maintaining spaces for dialogue among researchers, activists, and practitioners to document, analyze, and contest the security drifts underway in our societies, all while remaining vigilant about the power dynamics and ethical challenges these collaborations entail.

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References:

Nano, Edlira, and Félix Tréguer, 2024, “From Myth-Making to Quiet Dereliction: An Overview of Predictive Policing in France”, CUPP Conference, IT University of Copenhagen, January 30, 2024.

Tréguer, Félix, 2024, “Technopolice: A research-action initiative to counter new technologies of police surveillance”, CUPP Conference, IT University of Copenhagen, January 30, 2024.