Swiss military drones and the border space: a critical study of the surveillance exercised by border guards

Abstract

Abstract. This paper focuses on the Swiss border guard's relationship with the border space since the use of military drone systems (ADS-95 Ranger) for surveillance missions. Firstly, the paper highlights how the use of these flying devices both facilitates and limits the acquisition of new knowledge by the border guards. It then explores the way in which the fundamentally mobile and flexible nature of this technology also gives rise to new surveillance practices and identification controls. We show that these changes influence the border guard's relationship with the border. To achieve this, our analysis is based on empirical data obtained from semistructured interviews with key players in the field, action maps and field observation carried out during a "drone engagement" in September 2014. One major question therefore guides this study: how do military drone systems -by way of the new knowledge and practices they generate -influence relationships in the border space?

Big data from the sky: popular perceptions of private drones in Switzerland

“…as chains of acting entities that allow and mediate action on other action (Foucault, 1982). With the current proliferation of drones, their action potential is more widely distributed, rearticulated, and inverted, thus breaking off the longstanding monopoly and privilege of the "powerful" to look on space from above (O Tuathail, 1996), spanning from the ancient emperors' city walls and towers to the modern state's satellites. In this sense, the politics of visibility conveyed by the proliferating drone gaze adds a new chapter to the long history of the vertical gaze, adopted in order to understand, order, control, and act on space (Gregory, 1994;Shapiro, 1997).…”

“…With the present investigation, we pursue a more longstanding reflection on the power issues and aero-spatial functioning, logics, and implications of drones (Klauser and Pedrozo, 2015;Pedrozo, 2017), bound up with a yet still wider theoretical project of developing a specifically politico-geographical approach to the problematics of big data and surveillance (Klauser, 2013(Klauser, , 2017. Hereby, we understand political geography as the academic field that studies power and space in its co-constitutive and mediated relationship (Cox et al, 2008:7).…”

Aerial Politics of Visibility: Actors, Spaces, and Drivers of Professional Drone Usage in Switzerland

“…The first research emphasis focuses on the military use of drones for the purposes of border control (Loukinas 2017;Pedrozo 2017), homeland security (Wall 2013), and armed conflict abroad (Gregory 2011;Greene 2015;Krishnan 2015;Kindervater 2016). With regard to the latter, existing research has problematised the asymmetries produced by the fact that drones allow their users "to be able to kill without being able to be killed; to be able to see without being seen.…”

Topographies of security and the multiple spatialities of (conservation) power: Verticality, surveillance, and space-time compression in the bush

“…Much of the attention given to verticality in conservation focuses on the biological monitoring capabilities of aerial technologies like drones, helicopters, and planes (Arts et al, 2015;Christie et al, 2016). Mirroring dynamics in other security and policing contexts (Adey, 2010;Adey et al, 2011;Crampton, 2015;Graham, 2004;Graham & Hewitt, 2013;Pedrozo, 2017;Shaw, 2016), recent attention has turned to the use of aerial security and surveillance technologies to secure conservation territories and nature against the poaching threat (Linchant et al, 2015;Mulero-Pázmány et al, 2014;Olivares-Mendez et al, 2015;Snitch, 2015). The increasing turn to drones, helicopters, and satellites is in large part an attempt to increase the capacity of anti-poaching and other security actors to protect biodiversity, neutralise hunting groups, and ultimately secure conservation space in response to increases in commercial poaching, especially of charismatic megafauna like rhino and elephant.…”

“…They examine how even when territorial conservation interventions seeking to re-order socio-natural configurations fail on the ground, they remain productive in shaping conservation imaginaries thereby perpetuating the creation of particular types of (exclusionary) conservation spatialities. Following Massey's insights concerning knowledge-related power-geometries, research in other contexts suggests that geographical knowledge, and the promises of such knowledge, produced and enabled by aerial technologies do indeed work to re-shape how people envision and thus produce and govern space and socio-spatial relations (Pedrozo, 2017;Shaw, 2016;Shim, 2014). Do aerial technologies have the potential to have a similar double-territorialising effect whereby they might contribute to novel processes and dynamics of conservation territorialisation by facilitating a power over space, resources, and people, yet also influence how people think and envision conservation-security and anti-poaching in simplistic terms (see for e.g.…”