Short Abstract

This panel examines automated border surveillance through the lens of African social ontology, showing how AI transforms relational personhood into fixed risk data. It explores how algorithmic governance perpetuates historical restrictions on African mobility, offering a constructive critique.

Long Abstract

Digital technologies, such as biometric registries, AI visa screening, and automated surveillance at borders, increasingly influence the governance of mobility in Africa. While these tools are framed as objective solutions for security and efficiency, they introduce important ontological and epistemic changes. This panel critiques automated border governance through a decolonial lens, contrasting the logic of biometric datafication with African social ontologies of personhood and agency. Grounding the inquiry in African philosophical critiques of technology and relational ethics, we contend that algorithmic borders enact a form of digital reductionism. They diminish the mobile subject's relational personhood, socio-historical context, and moral agency, reinterpreting complex individuals into static risk scores and quantifiable data points. This digital gaze effectively reinstates colonial patterns of spatial containment, preemptively limiting African movement even before actual border crossings occur.

This panel reveals how automated governance upholds global mobility hierarchies and enforces epistemic violence against people from the Global South by analysing smart border narratives via a decolonial lens. In the end, this panel shows that overcoming algorithmic repression calls for a fundamental ontological reorientation, re-centering African viewpoints, rather than merely procedural data privacy solutions. In an era of automated surveillance, frameworks of relationality and shared vulnerability offer a crucial ethical basis for rethinking mobility, human dignity, and democratic government.

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