Designs of borders: Security, critique, and the machines (original) (raw)
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Security Dialogue, 2016
Migration controls at the external EU borders have become a large field of political and financial investment in recent years – indeed, an 'industry' of sorts – yet conflicts between states and border agencies still mar attempts at cooperation. This article takes a close look at one way in which officials try to overcome such conflicts: through technology. In West Africa, the secure 'Seahorse' network hardwires border cooperation into a satellite system connecting African and European forces. In Spain's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, advanced border fencing has joined up actors around a supposedly impenetrable divide. And on the EU level, the 'European external border surveillance system', or Eurosur, papers over power struggles between agencies and states through 'decentralized' information-sharing – even as the system’s physical features (nodes, coordination centres, interfaces) deepen competition between them. The article shows how such technologies, rather than 'halting migration', have above all acted as catalysts for new social relations among disparate sectors, creating areas for collaboration and competition, compliance and conflict. With these dynamics in mind, the conclusion sketches an 'ecological' perspective on the materialities of border control – infrastructure, interfaces, vehicles – while calling for more research on their contradictory and often counterproductive consequences.
Security, industry and migration in European border control
Routledge Handbook of the Politics of Migration in Europe, 2018
Over the last twenty years, several European countries began to frame the migration of asylum seekers as a security issue. Over the same period, the external European borders have become sites of a historic militarisation, the process that targets displaced people in dire humanitarian circumstances. It is, however, far too easy to understand European initiatives, such as Operation Sophia, the deployment of Greek, Turkish and NATO-vessels along the Aegean route towards Europe, or indeed the ripple effect of new fences and border controls spread across and externalised beyond Europe, as something new and unprecedented. This chapter details why this is not the case by examining European border control as a socio-geographic and economic space. It provides an overview of important questions posed about the borders’ underlying systemic logic (hereunder securitisation), the assumption of a technological potential for pervasive control as well as the many different public and private actors and interests which intersect to create the specificities of European border politics. The chapter investigates how the introduction of a host of new security technologies, the very functionality of the European borders, has created certain lock-in effects, further accelerating the restrictive border militarisation. While the focus of the chapter is on border security, we need to understand this topic against the backdrop of a thirty-year long European failure to establish a system of relocation and resettlement of refugees between its member states. The political choice to accelerate border militarisation is thus also a choice to abandon alternative uses of border technologies, such as safe flight-channels out of conflict zones, protection-sensitive entry-points configured to identifying vulnerable asylum seekers, or the swift exchange of information between national asylum systems. This leads to a critical appraisal of the relationship between technologies of border security and Europe’s ‘fight against illegal migration’.
Smart Borders Package: a new Security Apparatus for the Government of Mobility in the EU
Information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the adoption of large-scale databases play a crucial role in border management and mobility governance. On April 6, 2016, the European Commission launched a second edited version of the ‘Smart Border Package’ which did not secure consensus in 2013. The Package is designed to overcome one of the major paradoxes of our age: the necessity to leave borders open for commerce, tourism and education, while at the same time keeping them close to criminals, terrorists, and illegal migrants. By drawing from governmentality and Foucauldian “politics of scientific statement”, this thesis examines the Smart Borders Package as an attempt to (re)construct the security apparatus responsible for the government of human mobility travelling in and out of the Schengen Area. By submitting the empirical materials to critical discourse analysis, this thesis, first of all, argues that borders have become networked, virtualised, and diffused institutions for policing over the clandestine side of globalisation. Accordingly, mobility is made ‘visible’ and ‘legible’ through the informatization of the body, and simultaneously amenable to intervention by means of ‘the generalised biopolitical border’. Secondly, knowledge in the form of statistics is employed to make uncertainties regarding mobility observable and actionable, whilst risk management opens up spaces for government interventions, ultimately resting on a logic proper of the intelligence field. Thirdly, a new relationship between science and knowledge emerges, culminating in the adoption of a pre-emptive approach to security in the form of dataveillance. However, challenges to the security apparatus occur when law enforcement and border authorities are urged to take actions in conditions of epistemic uncertainty, which might culminate in practices of statistical discrimination and epistemic injustices. It is suggested that the gathering and processing of information about mobility could result to be both, an asset and entailing possibilities for governmental abuses on innocent third-country nationals. Therefore, greater caution is recommended in applying pre-emptive security strategies in situations where there is a lack of substantial evidence and decisions stem from data-driven knowledge and reasoned imagination.
Border security and the digitalisation of sovereignty: insights from EU borderwork
European Security, 2022
The European Union’s effort at controlling its external borders is an endeavour that increasingly relies on digital systems: from tools for information gathering and surveillance to systems for communicating between different agencies and across member states. This makes EU borders a key site for the politics of “digital sovereignty” – of controlling digital data, software and infrastructures. In this article, we propose a new understanding of how the concepts of digital and sovereignty interplay: sovereignty by digital means, sovereignty of the digital, and sovereignty over the digital. We do it by analysing three key manifestations within the EU’s borderwork: firstly, the expansion of EURODAC to include facial biometric data; secondly, the creation of the (future) shared Biometric Matching System (sBMS); and thirdly, the EU-funded West Africa Police Information System (WAPIS). These databases and systems exemplify three transformations of EU borderwork that invoke different dimensions of digital sovereignty: expansion of techniques for governing migration; interoperability of EU databases facilitating the internalisation of borders through domestic policing; and extra-territorialization of borderwork beyond the geographic limits of the EU.
Smartening border security in the European Union: An associational inquiry
Security Dialogue, 2016
This contribution asks how the reliance on mass dataveillance of travellers is sustained as a central policy option in the governance of EU border security. It examines this question by analysing a recent initiative of the European Commission proposing the establishment of EU ‘smart borders’. The analysis draws from a set of thinking tools developed by the sociology of association in the field of science and technology studies. The contribution argues that in order to grasp policy outcomes such as smart borders, security would benefit from adopting a compositional outlook on agency, where action is seen as the effect of associated entities. Looking at the smartening of EU borders, the piece finds that this process is held together by multiple translations and enrolments through which the technical side of dataveillance – platforms, automated gates, matching systems and so forth – has become associated to the processes of policymaking on border security, and sustains the furtherance of mass dataveillance.
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2021
A central and formative ingredient in the governance of migration in the European Union (EU) is the continuous construction of a large-scale digital infrastructure to ensure border security. Although border and critical security studies have increasingly focused on the multiple aspects of techno-materiality and infrastructural devices of border control, less has been said about how such an infrastructure encodes and transmits collective future visions of border (in)security. Therefore, this paper analyzes the making of a sociotechnical imaginary of digital transformation of the EU border regime, specifically focusing on the role of eu-LISA, the European agency for the development and management of large-scale IT systems. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview material, we analyze the ways in which this agency emerges as a site for assembling and rehearsing this sociotechnical imaginary, gradually transforming borders into sites of experimentation in the EU Schengen labor...
European border surveillance systems running a self-fulfilling circle
"The background for storing information in the SIS is wide and discretionary, many items of information are evaluative, and 'discreet surveillance' quite clearly opens for political surveillance and surveillance of a wide circle of individuals around the main person." As early as 1999 Thomas Mathiesen drew this conclusion based on an analysis of the first generation Schengen Information System (SIS). We intend to take up this line of reasoning, and highlight the exclusionary mechanisms built into the EU's common asylum policy, enforced through the development of a "vast 'panoptical machine'", potentially being "the most repressive political instrument of modernity". Since 2013 a network of border surveillance systems is in place, grounded on the advanced and interlinked functions of the Second Generation of the internal border surveillance system SIS (SIS II) and the introduction of the external European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR). Both systems have been designed to monitor the influx of individuals, such as economic migrants and asylum seekers. This has become a highly topical issue, as the dividing line between asylum seekers and "illegal" immigrants has become blurred. Both groups are perceived as threats by a growing segment of the public and by right wing political parties throughout Europe (Aradau, 2004; Huysmans & Squire, 2009). In this line Squire (2009) stresses the emergence of the notion of "asylum-seeker-cum-illegal-immigrant" (p.12). Accordingly, it is suggested that surveillance by EU systems leads to the exclusion of undocumented asylum seekers that become conflated with illegal immigrants and thereby are depicted as a threat to the Union's security. Against this background, this paper examines the question as to what degree the workings of EU surveillance systems foster this conflation of asylum with "illegal" immigration, in particular through a strengthened interoperability of the EU border surveillance systems, leading to an increasing exclusion of asylum seekers.