The Diffuse Border: Intelligence-Sharing, Control and Confinement along Canada's Smart Border

Abstract

Taking its cue from Deleuze's reading of Foucault's notion of apparatus (dispositif), this article explores the assemblage of mechanisms, institutions, discourses and practices that came to be conceptualized as a "smart border." Through an examination of Canadian policy documents, this article analyses the smart border as a "diffuse border." Physically extending beyond and inside its geopolitical location through a set of legal, administrative and technological procedures such as refugee containment, counter-terrorism measures and information-sharing, the border thus articulates fluid control measures based on the use of information technologies to more restrictive procedures such as confinement. As a lack of transparency and racialized assessments of dangerousness often characterize its operations, the smart border apparatus calls for an analysis of the ways in which it contributes to the building of an "intelligence paradigm" through which the securitization of the region is undertaken.Non pas prédire, mais être attentif à l'inconnu qui frappe à la porte. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif?

Technologies, déqualification et luttes d’influence chez les professionnels de la sécurité frontalière

“…Dans cette optique, nous avons examiné ailleurs la manière dont la frontière canado-américaine a été spatialement diffusée en tant que « frontière intelligente » (smart border) (Côté-Boucher, 2008). Le caractère « intelligent » de la frontière s'exprime dans le recours à des technologies de l'information et à des moyens d'identification centrés sur le corps (par exemple biométrie et scanneurs corporels) que discours et politiques sécuritaires présentent comme gages d'une action de sécurité efficiente.…”

Spatialities of security and surveillance: Managing spaces, separations and circulations at sport mega events

“…Together, the examples provide a strong flavour of the multi-scalar system of threat filters situated both within and outside the Swiss and Austrian national territory, implying an increased dissociation of surveillance-as-border-control from the territorial frontiers (Albert and Brock, 1996, p. 62). This ''de-bordering process'' (Rumford, 2006;Côté-Boucher, 2008) is not exclusive to mega-event security, but the special conditions of, and measures at, sport mega events add further importance to it.…”

“…What is emerging is a temporally limited, security-related form of ''passage-point urbanism'' (Graham, 2010, p. 145). Thus event surveillance appears as a ''programme of govern-ment of movement '' (Côté-Boucher, 2008), aimed at establishing routes and passage points for channelling, tracking and monitoring as well as facilitating and speeding up various lines and types of circulation, from point to point and from zone to zone. Yet compared to the differentiation and categorisation of access control, such processes of ordering (privileging and restricting) circulations are not neutral.…”

From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data

“…More specifically, after a long period in which the discussions of the imbrications of surveillance and space have been channelled mostly through concerns with spatial enclosure and fixity-relating to the surveillance of particular buildings (Benton-Short 2007), wider spatial enclaves (Coaffee 2004;Klauser 2010), access and border control, (Franzen 2001) etc.-a growing interdisciplinary literature is now exploring the complex spatialities of surveillance relating to the control and management of different types of mobilities and flows (Amoore 2006;Wood and Graham 2006;Côté-Boucher 2008).…”