An inquiry into the digitisation of border and migration management: performativity, contestation and heterogeneous engineering

Abstract

This article is concerned with the digitisation of border security and migration management. Illustrated through an encounter between a migrant and the Visa Information System (VIS)-one of the largest migration-related biometric databases worldwide-the article's first part outlines three implications of digitisation. We argue that the VIS assembles a set of previously unconnected state authorities into a group of end users who enact border security and migration management through the gathering, processing and sharing of data; facilitates the practice of traceability, understood as a rationality of mobility control; and has restrictive effects on migrants' capacity to manoeuvre and resist control. Given these implications, the article's second part introduces three analytical sensitivities that help to avoid some analytical traps when studying digitisation processes. These sensitivities take their cue from insights and concepts in science and technology studies (STS), specifically material semiotics/Actor Network Theory (ANT) approaches. They concern, firstly, the ways that data-based security practices perform the identities of the individuals that they target; secondly, the need to consider possible practices of subversion by migrants to avoid control-biased analyses; and finally, the challenge to study the design and development of border security technologies without falling into either technological or socio-political determinism.

‘Request Denied’: Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation and Treason for Border and Migration Studies

“…This brief and necessarily selective overview showcases the analytical potential of a sociology of translation for the study of borders and migration. It highlights in particular the capacity of a sociology of translation to account for the material dimension of migration and its management and to unpack the often 'black-boxed' inner workings of related technologies and knowledge practices (Glouftsios and Scheel 2020;Pelizza 2021). A second analytical advantage attributed to a sociology of translation is that it permits scholars to move beyond a representational mode of critique of knowledge production in the context of border and migration management (Pelizza 2021;Scheel 2021;Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019).…”

“…Hence, the task of an ANT-inspired analysis is to 'follow the actors' (Latour 2007, 12) and describe how they are translated as they engage in shifting sociotechnical networks 'in which bits and pieces from the social, the technical, the conceptual and the textual are fitted together' (Law 1992, 381). This makes ANT a promising approach for studying the procedures, devices and infrastructures through which mobile people hitherto unknown to authorities are translated into legible subjects at sites of border and migration control, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates (Bellanova and Fuster 2013;Glouftsios 2018;Glouftsios and Scheel 2020;Pelizza 2021;Pollozek and Passoth 2019;Rogier 2019;Schouten 2014).…”

“…Within this line of research, numerous studies mobilise an ANT-inspired framework to move beyond a representationalist mode of critique of authorities' efforts to create legible subjects (e.g. Glouftsios and Scheel 2020;Pelizza 2021;Pollozek and Passoth 2019;Scheel 2021). What the following analysis adds to this body of literature is that it shows how ANTinspired analyses -if complemented by a grammar of treason -allow for a detailed study of the mechanisms of power at work in these border encounters that accounts for related struggles, contestations, the use of coercion and violence as well as instances of friction, mistranslation and break-down.…”

New actors and contested architectures in global migration governance: continuity and change

“…Advanced technologies such as retina scanning, digital fingerprinting and international data sharing raise ethical questions regarding data protection and human rights (Thomas 2006). In addition, the outsourcing of security tasks to private companies and information technology specialists raises concerns about a lack of oversight and responsibility (Glouftsios and Scheel 2020).…”

The fallacy of perfect regulatory controls: Lessons from database surveillance of migration in West Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s

“…Indeed, the policy area of irregular migration is likely to generate a lack of political willingness to gather data on a population that is hardly possible to monitor (Boswell & Badenhoop 2020). Moreover, where comprehensive migration databases are in place, they can produce severe malfunctionings as one faulty search hit may force a regular migrant to contest the identity of an irregular migrant that the database mistakenly assigned to them (Glouftsios & Scheel 2020).…”