Between Infrastructural Experimentation and Collective Imagination: The Digital Transformation of the EU Border Regime

Abstract

A central and formative ingredient in the governance of migration in the European Union (EU) is the continuous construction of a large-scale digital infrastructure to ensure border security. Although border and critical security studies have increasingly focused on the multiple aspects of techno-materiality and infrastructural devices of border control, less has been said about how such an infrastructure encodes and transmits collective future visions of border (in)security. Therefore, this paper analyzes the making of a sociotechnical imaginary of digital transformation of the EU border regime, specifically focusing on the role of eu-LISA, the European agency for the development and management of large-scale IT systems. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview material, we analyze the ways in which this agency emerges as a site for assembling and rehearsing this sociotechnical imaginary, gradually transforming borders into sites of experimentation in the EU Schengen laboratory. As our case illustrates, studying the visionary dimensions of digital infrastructuring helps us to understand how imagination becomes collectivized and materialized, opens up or closes down sociotechnical realizations, and thus tacitly governs the project of digitally infrastructuring the EU border regime.

‘Crisis’, control and circulation: Biometric surveillance in the policing of the ‘crimmigrant other’

“…Because the centralised database architecture of Eurodac had already been set up by eu-LISA, the further necessary ‘formatting’ (Bellanova and Glouftsios, 2022: 456) towards sBMS – for example adding different types of biometric data, widening access for law enforcement, and enabling interoperability of databases for cross-validating identity records – becomes a matter of ‘management, re-organisation and re-purposing of datasets’ (Bellanova and Glouftsios, 2022: 454). The vision of a ‘digital transformation’, to enable greater data collection and uses, drives infrastructural experimentation (Trauttmansdorff and Felt, 2021: 644–647), moving identity management into a new digital space (Leese, 2022) that is hoped to be more reliable in the social sorting of asylum seekers. The digital ‘interoperability’ programme, Trauttmansdorff (2022) argues, is the latest attempt to manage risk and uncertainty arising from mobile identities by capturing and rendering them immutable.…”

The strange resilience of the UK e-Borders programme: Technology hype, failure and lock-in in border control

“…If the economic and institutional accounts focus on the strategies and vested interests of actors implicated in border technologies, a second account understands lock-in as an upshot of the performative effects of sociotechnical infrastructures and assemblages, which unleash new and self-sustaining dynamics. Science and technology studies/critical security studies literature has deployed the concept of information infrastructures to understand how new technologies can reconfigure the agency of street-level administrators and border agents (Pelizza, 2017; Trauttmansdorff and Felt, 2021), recalibrating social relations (Pollozek and Pasoth, 2019) and reconstituting subjectivities (Pötzsch, 2015). Others have developed the concept of sociotechnical assemblages to show how border technologies become appropriated in different ways by a range of actors, generating conflict, competition and failure (Andersson, 2016).…”

Business digital transformation: strategy adaptation, communication and future agenda

“…Defining and adhering to a DT strategy is complex due to the multifaceted nature of DT (Matt et al, 2015). Companies need to avoid oversimplification and cognitive biases, focusing instead on a gradual approach that identifies areas for improvement and necessary updates (Trauttmansdorff and Felt, 2023). This aspect of DT also presents opportunities for developing innovative, flexible and robust strategic approaches.…”