This chapter discusses the concept of security and the field of security studies and traces its development from the narrowly confined origins in IR towards a multi-disciplinary field that has incorporated perspectives from adjacent disciplines such as sociology, surveillance studies, legal studies, cultural studies, and technical fields. The identification of new security issues, new sites of security production, and new security practices then lays the foundation for a review of new questions for security studies vis-à-vis privacy and data protection and outlines the role of a privacy/data protection perspective for the (critical) study of security and its larger political, social, and economic ramifications. Finally, the chapter engages the challenges posed to privacy and data protection by securitization processes, particularly against the backdrop of a Big Data perspective on the analysis of security-relevant data.
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