This article takes the reader inside four border security fairs in Europe and North America to examine the knowledge practices of border security professionals. Building on the border security as practice research agenda, the analysis focuses on the production, circulation, and consumption of scarce forms of knowledge. To explore situated knowledge of border security practices, I develop an approach to multi-sited event ethnography to observe and interpret knowledge that may be hard to access at the security fairs. The analysis focuses on mechanisms for disseminating and distributing scarce forms of knowledge, technological materializations of situated knowledge, expressions of transversal knowledge of security problems, how masculinities structure knowledge in gendered ways, and how unease is expressed through imagined futures in order to anticipate emergent solutions to proposed security problems. The article concludes by reflecting on the contradictions at play at fairs and how to address such contradictions through alternative knowledges and practices.
Evidence suggests that business lobbying shapes European Union (EU) border security policies, but there has been no detailed empirical and theoretical work detailing how interest groups exert influence in this domain. Building on strategic constructivist accounts of policy-making, the article argues that EU border security policies have been tailored to the preferences, identities, and frames of business actors through three key processes. Policy preferences are co-constituted by business actors through strategic communication, identities are constructed to gain political legitimacy through strategic legitimation, and social contexts are framed to fit business interests through practices of strategic contextualisation. I use evidence from in-depth interviews with key actors in the field of EU border security policymaking, participant observation at key border security events, and analysis of key policy documents to build the argument.
Building on the concept of the ‘surveillance-industrial complex’, I move from the ‘complex’ to the ‘community’, situating a number of organizations within ‘surveillance design communities’ (SDCs). SDCs are networks of linked organizations which engage in researching, developing, producing, and circulating surveillance technologies. Empirically I draw from data on the organizations involved in border surveillance funded by the European Union’s FP7-Security programme. Based on the novel conceptualization of SDCs, coupled with an analysis of new network data, the article demonstrates that important contributions to the design of surveillance are distributed among a small core of central organizations surrounded by communities of actors assembled in overlapping hierarchies. Hence, SDCs are interwoven, multiscalar networks of networks rather than simply a total ‘complex’ or sites for the overlap of the ‘public’ and ‘private’.
This article contributes to the literature on the European border security industry with a network analysis of a new bipartite data set. The network is composed of speakers and their speech topics at a European border security conference taking place from 2008 to 2015. Speakers are linked to conferences by year of attendance and to speech topics to identify key actors and discourses using measures of centrality. A multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MR-QAP) is used to explain the continuity of conference speech topics. The centrality analysis reveals a number of "hubs" and the discourse analysis reveals a consistent focus on social control and surveillance over human rights. The MR-QAP regression suggests that shared discourses are driven by organisations which act as key speakers at many events, and whose discourses are prioritised over those of other actors. The article concludes with notes on the critical implications of the findings.
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