Marieke de Goede is Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, and Principal Investigator of FOLLOW. She has researched European security practices for over 15 years, with a focus on the politics of preemption in countering terrorism, financial intelligence and the role of banks in security. Her work has been published in i.a. European Journal of International Relations, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Political Geography.
Rocco Bellanova is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He holds a double PhD in Political & Social Sciences and in Law, which has been awarded in 2014 by the Université Saint-Louis-Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Between 2013 and 2016 he has worked at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His research mainly focuses on European data-driven security practices and the role played by data protection in their governance. His work sits at the intersection of politics, law and science & technology studies.
Esmé Bosma obtained her PhD at the Department of Political Science the University of Amsterdam. She studied the ‘gatekeepers’ role of banks and how they aim to counter terrorist financing in practice. Her thesis explores how political and ethical choices materialise at the human-technology interface and analyses the production of customer risk profiles, the design and use of transaction monitoring systems, and the emergence of public-private partnerships to counter terrorist financing.
Tasniem Anwar is a PhD student in the FOLLOW project. She has a master’s degree in Conflict Resolution and Governance (MSc) and Law and Politics of International Security (LLM). She previously worked as a junior teacher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. In the FOLLOW project, she will focus her research on the politics of the court room. With her research she hopes to provide a theoretical and empirical contribution, from a critical perspective, to the research on the judicial aspects of CTF regulations. She is particularly interested in the interplay of the legal and the political and how we can understand the court judgements through this relationship.
Pieter Lagerwaard is a PhD Candidate in the FOLLOW project. He aims to understand the European landscape of Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) and how they engage in Counter Terrorism Finance (CTF) practices. By focusing on the daily practices of financial intelligence professionals he hopes to unpack and bring to the fore the perspectives of professionals themselves and the daily dilemma’s they face on such topics as societal expectations, privacy considerations, technological restrictions, and other practice-related challenges.
Polly Pallister-Wilkins is an assistant professor in International Relations and Conflict Resolution and Governance. As an affiliated researcher of FOLLOW, Pallister-Wilkins supervises the first PhD project by Esmé Bosma on banks. In her own research she specialises in the intersection of humanitarian intervention and border control, what she calls ‘humanitarian borderwork’. Her research has been published in amongst others: International Political Sociology, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Security Dialogue, Antipode, Third World Quarterly and Global Policy.
Dr. Mara Wesseling is lead-researcher for a research project on Combating Terrorism Financing requested by the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice and the Ministry of Finance. This study investigates the initiatives that have been taken by the different public actors (law enforcement, intelligence and judicial branch…) and private actors in regulated sectors (banks, financial sector…) to combat terrorism financing in the period of 2013-2016. It also assesses how these activities relate to the FATF recommendations and guidelines.
Beste İşleyen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include critical security studies, borders, migration and conflict. İşleyen is currently working on a project on Turkey’s border and migration practices. This project is funded by a VENI Grant (Project Number 451-15-33) by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). İşleyen’s most recent journal articles have appeared in European Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Mediterranean Politics and Security Dialogue.
Carola Westermeier is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). She holds degrees in History, Journalism and Sociology. She has previously worked at the Institute for Sociology at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany, and was also a member of the collaborative research centre ‘Dynamics of Security’ (SFB 138) and the ‘Graduate Center for the Study of Culture’ (GCSC).
Bruno Magalhães has worked as a visiting post-doctoral researcher at UvA and studies the making of borders. He now holds an appointment as executive director of PUC’s recently established Digital Humanities Lab (#dhLab) – a transdisciplinary research centre where anthropologists, computer scientists, geographers, engineers, sociologists, poets, art historians, architectcs, psychologists, and all sorts of interesting people – including the odd IR scholar – are working together to get ahead of attempts to govern people by governing data.