Is Europe Turning into a ‘Technological Fortress’? Innovation and Technology for the Management of EU’s External Borders: Reflections on FRONTEX and EUROSUR

Abstract

Once upon a time, in an era where the states defined themselves as 'sovereign', there was a border point. The border point was a place where a guard or a police-like officer used to ask to check a document called passport, which entitled a person to cross the border. States' ambitions to enhance controls over the flux of non-citizens entering their territories led them to raise the requirements and ask for an extra document, the visa, a form of permission required before arriving at a state's port or entry. 1 Nowadays the social physiognomy of the border has radically changed for a wide range of reasons. First, we name the context where the border performs its function. Looking at the European region, the internal market project and its freedom of movement rationale have deprived member states' (hereinafter: MS) borders of most of their meanings. Lately, the Schengen process has removed controls at internal frontiers and required the strengthening of external borders for the benefit of European citizens. 2 The ambitious project of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (hereinafter: AFSJ), 'without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border control, asylum, immigration, and the prevention and combating of crime' 3 has consolidated these milestones into something aimed at being a more coherent and comprehensive project. 4

e-Securing the EU Borders: AI in European Integrated Border Management

“…In the Schengen Area, the border monitoring is governed by the Schengen Borders Code of 2006. The border checks among member states, have been annulled and third country nationals enjoy unhampered mobility across the Union once they enter the Union (Marin, 2011). This single area means that a threat happening in a member state will be rapidly diffused and will influence the other ones.…”

“…In the context of FRONTEX, the European Border Surveillance system (EUROSUR), founded in EUROSUR is a key player in the implementation of EIBM (Marin, 2011).…”

Precarious migrants, migration regimes and digital technologies: the empowerment-control nexus

“…A new strand of research has developed within the field of surveillance, security and border studies, by focusing on intersections between digital technologies, security rationales and migrations regimes. It started to observe an on-going process of 'digitalization of the European borders' (Broeders 2007) which aims to transform the EU into a 'cyber-fortress' (Marin 2011). In particular, these studies scrutinise the ways biometrics, coupled with ICTs, are incorporated in migration and border control.…”

Spy, track and archive: The temporality of visibility in Eurosur and Jora

“…If monitoring and mapping devices are not missing from scholarship on security and migration (Jeandesboz, 2011;Heller, Pezzani, 2014;Marin, 2011;Seiffarth, 2012), they are however mainly studied through a reading of EU documents or grounded on interviews conducted with the actors who manage those dispositives, while there is far less attention paid to their effective functioning.…”

“…If monitoring and mapping devices are not completely missing from scholarship on security and migration (Jeandesboz, 2011; Heller and Pezzani, 2014; Marin, 2011; Seiffarth, 2012), they are however mainly studied through a reading of EU documents or interviews conducted with the actors who manage those dispositives, while far less attention has been paid to their effective functioning. In particular, as Dijstelbloem et al (2017: 225) rightly stress, what is missing in the literature is a ‘political topology that is not wholly structured by a “surveillance apparatus”, but which transacts the workings of such an apparatus with migrants, vessels and tactics at sea’.…”