The ambition of this special issue is to contribute to contemporary scholarly analyses of border security by bringing more focus onto a specific field of inquiry: the practices of the plurality of power-brokers involved in the securing of borders. Border security is addressed from the angle of the everyday practices of those who are appointed to carry it out; considering border security as practice is essential for shedding light on contemporary problematizations of security. Underscoring the methodological specificity of fieldwork research, we call for a better grounding of scholarship within the specific agencies intervening in bordering spaces in order to provide detailed analyses of the contextualized practices of security actors.

Taking its cue from Deleuze's reading of Foucault's notion of apparatus (dispositif), this article explores the assemblage of mechanisms, institutions, discourses and practices that came to be conceptualized as a "smart border." Through an examination of Canadian policy documents, this article analyses the smart border as a "diffuse border." Physically extending beyond and inside its geopolitical location through a set of legal, administrative and technological procedures such as refugee containment, counter-terrorism measures and information-sharing, the border thus articulates fluid control measures based on the use of information technologies to more restrictive procedures such as confinement. As a lack of transparency and racialized assessments of dangerousness often characterize its operations, the smart border apparatus calls for an analysis of the ways in which it contributes to the building of an "intelligence paradigm" through which the securitization of the region is undertaken.Non pas prédire, mais être attentif à l'inconnu qui frappe à la porte. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif?

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Whether it insists on the significance of anticipation or interrogates the centrality of pre-crime to security practice, current scholarship misses how security professionals make sense of their work’s temporality. Borrowing its theoretical tools from the sociology of generations and evaluation, this article focuses on how Canadian border officers rely on generational categorizations to negotiate change in their work. It proposes exploring the coexistence of competing temporalities in border control through the notion of generational borderwork. Produced by different paths of professional socialization and embedded in tensions over social status in ports of entry, generational borderwork makes more explicit the security field’s logic of aging, the internal dissensions over policing methods and the decisions these differences sustain. Whether it concerns nostalgia for economic protectionism or disagreements over the respective value of intelligence, technologies and interview skills, the contested nature of time in border control invites investigation into officers’ transforming policing sensibilities.

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