Autonomy of migration within biometric border regimes?

Scheel, Stephan

doi:10.4324/9781315269030-3

Cited by 49 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This paper proposes that SSI should be considered part of a longer genealogy of classification systems that have not merely represented people, but have made or enacted them as governable subjects (Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda 2019;Scott 1998). Identification regimes sustain power geometries, biases and discriminations, and the technologies they rely on should be seen as part of the political struggle to control people's movement (Isin and Ruppert 2019;Madianou 2019a;Scheel 2019). The work of imagining, debating and developing potential border technologies like SSI is itself a practice of bordering and enactment (Bourne, Johnson, and Lisle 2015).…”

Section: Competing Logics (I): the Neutrality Of The Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

Cheesman

2020

Geopolitics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper critically examines the implications of 'self-sovereign identity' (SSI) for border politics and migration management. SSI refers to user-controlled, decentralised forms of digital identification. Closely linked with the distributed ledger technology blockchain, SSI is presented by advocates as a tool to empower marginalised groups, including refugees. Among other benefits, some claim that SSI removes the need for powerful, centralised institutional structures by giving individuals control and ownership of their identity information. However, through ethnographic research in an international aid organisation, I find that SSI is an embryonic technology with indeterminate properties and benefits. I identify a series of competing logics in the debates around SSI's emancipatory potential, which relate to four issues: (i) the neutrality of the technology, (ii) the capacities of refugees, (iii) global governance and the nation state, and (iv) new economic models for digital identity. SSI is simultaneously the potential enabler of new modes of empowerment, autonomy and data security for refugees and a means of maintaining and extending bureaucratic and commercial power. I situate SSI in a genealogy of systems of identity control and argue that, in practice, it is likely to feed into the powers of corporations and states over refugee populations.

show abstract

Section: Competing Logics (I): the Neutrality Of The Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

Cheesman

2020

Geopolitics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, people who are targeted by mobility control also display an extraordinary ability to resist containment and its multiple infrastructures (Bosworth 2014;Esposito et al 2019bEsposito et al , 2019aMatos and Esposito 2019;Peano 2012). Indeed, as evidenced by our protagonists' stories, they struggle to contrast criminalisation and to (re)enact autonomous strategies of movement and existence (see Scheel 2019). In this light, we believe that an analysis of governmental forms of mobility containment cannot overlook the daily tactics, disputes and negotiations carried out by those who are subjected to them, and who actually play a crucial role in the transformation of those same regimes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Fragmented citizenship: contemporary infrastructures of mobility containment along two migratory routes

Esposito

Murtaza

Peano

et al. 2020

Citizenship Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control can be most adequately grasped by the notion of 'containment', conceived as the redirection of people's autonomous movement into restricted and defined pathways. Following this idea, this article proceeds in three steps. First, it proposes an analysis of the 'infrastructures' through which containment is enforced, showing the plural dimensions (regulatory, humanitarian, commercial, social) of which they are composed. Second, analysing two cases of transnational mobility towards (and across) the EU, it shows the effect of containment on people's spatial and existential trajectories. And third, through the analysis of such cases, it contends that the ultimate effect of containment is the fragmentation of citizenship into a variety of intermediate 'latitudinal' positions characterised by partial and conditional access to rights, which are functional to several forms of exploitation, including labour but also profit extraction through the operations of containment infrastructures themselves.

show abstract

“…The functional specifications of the VIS illustrate that the build-up of biometric databases implies -and this is the second implication of the digitisation of border and migration management -a reconfiguration of the very rationale of mobility control, which revolves around the traceability of migrants and border crossers (Bonditti 2004;Scheel 2019). Philippe Bonditti (2010, 2) understands traceability as 'the capacity of security agencies to recreate geographical, social and digital trajectories of individuals, goods, capital and data' .…”

Section: Implications Of Digitisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Glouftsios

Scheel

2020

Third World Quarterly

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Autonomy of migration within biometric border regimes?

Cited by 49 publications

References 1 publication

Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

Self-Sovereignty for Refugees? The Contested Horizons of Digital Identity

Fragmented citizenship: contemporary infrastructures of mobility containment along two migratory routes

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About