Clean skins: Making the e-Border security assemblage

Abstract

How do border security practitioners engage with data and technology, and what difficulties or limitations arise from these engagements? Responding to calls for critically examining how technological 'solutions' are enacted, we analyse the notion of e-Borders in the UK context as an assemblage comprising abstract conditions, concrete objects, and agents whose roles often manifest themselves through perceptions and practices. We draw upon interviews with former and currently serving senior staff from the UK Home Office, UK Border Force, intelligence services, and private sector suppliers. Practitioners' reflections reveal how political, social, and human factors-including intuition and management cultures-both construct the e-Border assemblage and introduce discontinuities and frictions within it. Using a more tightly specified theory of assemblage, we highlight how human agents contribute to datafied phenomena like border control. In total, our study emphasises how assemblages are dynamic, never entirely coherent, and always being re-made.

Political geography III: Bounding the International

“…A central claim in that research, which is often informed by ethnographic methods, is that what actually happens at the border, and in migrant and refugee camps, usually differs from what is supposed to happen there. Especially given the growing technicalization of politics and the concomitant glamorization of technical fixes, this work reminds us of the contingency of political practice: even highly regimented spaces do not work entirely in the ways they are designed to work (Allen and Vollmer, 2018; Watkins, 2017; Varro, 2016). Researching the gap between the policy blueprint and the actual practice is difficult, as researchers often have to probe clandestine and criminal activities (Mainwaring and Brigden, 2016; Vives, 2017).…”

The many lives of border automation: Turbulence, coordination and care

“…First, we explore the extent to which the anthropocentrism underscoring this powerful fantasy of automation operates as a regulative ideal, how it governs the behaviours, practices, relations and imaginaries of those managing automated borders. Here, we build on Allen and Vollmer’s (2018) study of how UK border managers carefully traffic between believing in the promises of border technologies and being deeply suspicious of the machine’s ability to ‘read’ humans. We are particularly interested in the extent to which border agents feel trapped inside a ‘pro-automation’ vs. ‘anti-automation’ debate that forces them to staunchly defend either technology or humans.…”

“…Here, we draw inspiration from, and work in solidarity with, recent approaches to border automation that develop politically attuned ideas of assemblage and relationality (e.g. Allen and Vollmer, 2018; Paasi, 2011; Popescu, 2015a; Pötzsch, 2015; Sohn, 2016). Unpacking in/out border decisions through this approach is not about simply adding information to existing debates about automation as ‘a good thing’ or ‘a bad thing’: we are not interested in helping to populate this debate with more detail, complexity and diversity.…”

“…This echoed what we heard from the very senior European customs executive officer who explained, ‘machines don’t find stuff, customs officers do’. When we asked how customs officers knew who or what to single out, they often spoke about hunches, and a clear feeling ‘in your waters’ that ‘something is not right here’ (see also Allen and Vollmer, 2018). They could not articulate precisely what these hunches felt like, or how they learned to act on them, but there was a very powerful shared belief that ‘you can just tell’ when something or someone is not right.…”

Killing Us Slowly: Pre‐Empting Suicide at a Women’s Hostel in Chennai

“…As political battles over futurity command bleak narratives of what is to come, systems of “algorithmic security” (Amoore ) that use patterns of association and repetition to anticipate future potentials have come to be pervasive. Regimes of anticipation shape life—if in varying degrees of intensity—as much in border‐zones with declared states of emergency (Allen and Vollmer ; Amoore and De Goede ), as at the heart of the neoliberal dream in Indian cities where a proliferation of technologies and disciplines anticipates threats to everyday middle‐class life (Anand and Rademacher ; Doshi ). As this logic plays out, suicide becomes more than a spectacular event, stretching to include subjects who are biologically alive.…”