Description
In the past decade, Belgium has seen a significant increase in the development and deployment of smart video surveillance by law enforcement used amongst others for traffic control, crowd control, and loitering detection. Expanding on Melgaço and van Brakel’s provocation that the deployment of smart video surveillance in smart cities in Belgium and Brazil is often performative and not necessarily driven by surveillance capitalism, this research explores online surveillance and security discourses on smart video surveillance of the Belgian Police, Government, and third-party stakeholders to identify drivers behind smart video surveillance that go beyond surveillance capitalism. Employing discourse network analysis within the framework of ‘digital hermeneutics’, the study scrutinises the discursive online practices among three distinct actor groups—Police, Government, and third-party stakeholders. It focuses on the perspectives of these 3000 stakeholders surrounding the deployment of 'smart' video surveillance in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent from 2012-2022. This study not only contributes to a better understanding of drivers of smart video surveillance but also sheds light on the propagation of information through official and associated public channels.| Period | 30 Jun 2024 |
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| Event title | SSN: Surveillance Studies Network /Surveillance & Society 10th biennial conference: : Surveillance in an Age of Crisis |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Ljubljana, Slovenia |
| Degree of Recognition | International |