Rhizomatic dreams and nightmares: An exploration of rhizomatic harms and imaginaries of environmental surveillance for crime control

• In Event: Digital Criminology: Control and organized chaos in a ‘digital world’

Abstract

The escalating climate crisis and subsequent implementation of new legal measures, that criminalize environmental harms, have encouraged surveillance applications in natural environments for crime control. Apart from novel applications of surveillance these developments also imply new forms of algorithmic crime control appearing and a whole new market for surveillance technologies.

Starting from the premise that the harms of algorithmic surveillance should be understood as rhizomatic (Van Brakel and Govaerts, forthcoming), this paper aims to provide a thicker understanding of the harms of the use of surveillance technologies for environmental crime control. Based on this analysis and drawing inspiration from positive criminology (Schuilenburg, van Steden en Oude Breuil, 2014) and relational ethics (Van Brakel, 2022), the paper aims to identify avenues to reflect on and reimagine environmental crime control and as such contribute to new avenues of research within digital and green criminology.

Author

• Rosamunde Van Brakel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel