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- Convenors:
-
Vasileios Galis
(IT University of Copenhagen)
Elena Raviola (University of Gothenburg)
Vasilis Vlassis (IT University Copenhagen)
Luna Secher Rasmussen (IT University of Copenhagen)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers that investigate border and mobility control in terms of new technologies, practices and laws. We are interested in the tensions between democratic oversight as well as mobility and expectations of security that characterize the use of new forms of global borders.
Long Abstract:
Ours is an era characterized by simultaneous occurrence of several crises. Crises have long been an unexpected or constructed yet recurring part of social life, calling for action that tackles the insecurity of the moment and brings stability in areas such as border control and migration. National states and supranational authorities have historically risen to the task through increasing sophistication of border infrastructures as well as investments in (digitalization for) mobility and goods-circulation control. This proliferation of border crises means control has become pervasive in return, becoming a long-term method of mobility governance and border surveillance. Border infrastructure development is thus a means of addressing a permanent state of crisis across borderlands. This panel invites papers that investigate border and mobility control in terms of new technologies, practices and laws. We are particularly interested in the tensions between democratic oversight as well as mobility and expectations of security that characterize the use of new forms of digital surveillance at global borders. During the panel, we aim to include a diverse set of ideas, approaches, and methods to problematize how existing standards and legislation, and changes in them, are considered in digital border surveillance as well as how border infrastructures depend on constant retrofitting, responding to a variety of geopolitical events and international regulation – what we refer to as cracks and shocks.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Heather Paxson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Short abstract:
By outlining what regulatory compliance means for how U.S.-based food importers and brokers do their jobs, this paper reveals how risk-based analytics turns border control into a practice of auditing information that circulates apart from, yet remains essential to, the material goods it indexes.
Long abstract:
A “paradigm shift” is underway in U.S. government oversight of food safety and biosecurity. Previously, food safety import regulation was premised on keeping contaminants out of the national food supply by securing the border through surveillance and import refusals. However, as the volume of global trade soars, border control measures have turned many U.S. ports of entry into “chokepoints” where the flow of commerce encountered costly friction. The transformative 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) has shifted “the focus … from responding to contamination to preventing it.” Today, the metabolic politics of American food safety and biosecurity are enacted less by keeping “bad stuff” out than by extending the threshold of the regulatory zone outwards, such that (as a U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner said in 2012) “regulated products know no borders.” Legally, U.S.-based importers must now be able to verify that their international suppliers meet safety standards set by U.S. agencies. Thus, what’s metabolically absorbed into the U.S. today is not just sanctioned foodstuff but entire food industries. Drawing on ethnographic research within the specialty cheese industry, this paper outlines what FSMA compliance means for how U.S.-based food importers, and the customs brokers they hire, do their jobs. In doing so, it reveals how border control, in employing risk-based analytics, has become a practice of audit, of evaluating information that circulates quite apart from, yet remains essential to, the material goods it indexes.
Aditi Saraf (Utrecht University)
Short abstract:
This paper will examine financial intelligence and regulation as border infrastructures, with particular emphasis on how financial intelligence and surveillance is deployed to target historical exchange communities in disputed frontiers.
Long abstract:
Informal credit has historically formed an important basis for capital and commodity circulation in the markets of South Asia, comprising promissory payments settled according to vernacular timelines and practices. These systems are also regarded with acute suspicion outside their networks of circulation. In Indian-administered Kashmir, where I conducted research, this suspicion acquires another layer due to associations of informal credit with putatively illegal hawala transactions, viewed by the state as channels for ‘black money’ that fund anti-state protests and militant activities from across the border. After 9/11 there was a global "crackdown" on informal financial networks with the establishment of international financial intelligence and surveillance watchdogs, such as the supranational Financial Action Task Force that outlined and enforced global anti-money laundering directives. In my paper, I examine the entanglements between global financial intelligence, national counterinsurgency programs, and everyday trade and exchange in disputed borderlands to show how financial intelligence and regulation is used by states to enforce spatio-political rather than financial boundaries. Drawing on the rhetoric around financialization, "hawala scandals" and the experience of traders working amid political violence in Kashmir, I show how the seemingly innocuous language of financialization becomes a technique of territorialization - criminalizing historical exchange networks and "integrating" them within the putative borders of the nation-state.
Hyun-Gwi Park (Kyung Hee University)
Long abstract:
As evidenced by the clichés of the 'Iron Curtain' or 'Bamboo Wall', the persistence of the Cold War had much to do with border infrastructure. However, as the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolised the end of the Cold War (cf. Kwon 2008), the meaning of border structure became more flexible and elusive, negating simple binary dichotomies such as the closing/opening of borders. It also meant that borders were transformed from imagined geopolitical lines of separation maintained by military forces into infrastructures administered by different entities. Therefore, the growing 'crisis' of borders between North and South actually means the crisis of control of border infrastructures (De Genova 2017), justifying more sophisticated surveillance of migrant crossings at sea and in the desert, supported by smart border technologies. Against this backdrop, the Korean DMZ provides us with an interesting case not only as a military infrastructure (rogue infrastructure, according to Eleana Kim 2019) in the persistence of the Cold War geopolitical order in northeast Asia but also as an unspoiled 'ecological paradise' carrying the potential for the development. In short, the Korean DMZ is caught between unending Cold War and neoliberal frontier regime. The Korean DMZ tourism is operated in such tensions and contradictions Based on my fieldwork research in the DMZ area in recent years and also examination of the history of the DMZ are, I would like to present how such tensions and contradictions are played out in the various DMZ tourist programs.
Isabel Matthias (TU Berlin)
Short abstract:
Robots are increasingly integrated in infrastructures at EU external borders. I aim to investigate (a) the involved humans and technologies and (b) how they intra-act with each other, in order to (c) understand the process and systematics about it and (d) identify consequences and intervenability.
Long abstract:
States and conglomerates of states such as the European Union expedite the technologization and automatization of border infrastructures aiming to achieve a selective permeability for the border management among global lines of power. Especially the external borders of the European Union are an area where the interconnectedness of new technologies and the polycrisis of our times becomes highly visible. Different actors collide in these far-flung borderscapes and even new technological entities, such as robots, are introduced into the field. This process of integrating robots, like drones or so called unmanned vehicles, into border regimes at EU external borders demands for in-depth analysis but remains quite unresearched until now. At this juncture, the specific, future configurations of the robotization of borders still depends on the intra-actions of the involved actors and raises questions such as: Who will develop the robots? Who will make use of it against whom? Will there be queerings by activists, hackers or artists? How will people on the move deal with them? And what do the robots themselves bring to the table? Located in the field of (Queer-)Feminist Science and Technology Studies, I aim to investigate these questions following a four-step research design figuring out (a) who the involved human actors and robotic entities are and (b) how they intra-act with each other, in order to (c) understand the process and the systematics about it and (d) identify consequences and intervenability.
Maria Ullrich (Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn) Paul Friedrich Langer (German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer)
Long abstract:
Although the Mediterranean Sea is considered one of the most technologically monitored regions in the world, at least 2500 migrants died trying to cross it in 2023 alone. Other migrants who arrived by boat were prevented from applying for asylum in the European Union. Despite the increasing technological advances in border control through autonomous technologies and drones and the visibility they bring, they have not prevented these incidents of death and refoulement. We suspect that the potential of autonomous technologies for state actors to take responsibility for maritime migration is often not utilised to provide access to rights for people on the move. Instead, it seems to amount to evading legal responsibility for refugees (Bužinkić & Avon, 2020). We are particularly interested in how state actors construct and exploit legal "grey areas" through AI border technologies and drones at the southern European maritime borders. To investigate this, we draw on financial data, policy documents and existing literature on the technological capabilities of border actors (national coast guards and Frontex) at Europe's maritime borders. We hypothesise that the exploitation of such grey areas is possible due to 1) transnational dependencies and economic interests in the high-tech sector, 2) a legal landscape that is slowly evolving in response to new policy issues raised by AI, and 3) specific, sometimes unintended, forms of knowledge production through AI and drones. We illustrate these points with selected case studies on the southern European maritime borders.