Vision and Transterritory

Abstract

This essay is about the role of visual surveillance technologies in the policing of the external borders of the European Union (EU). Based on an analysis of documents published by EU institutions and independent organizations, I argue that these technological innovations fundamentally alter the nature of national borders. I discuss how new technologies of vision are deployed to transcend the physical limits of territories. In the last twenty years, EU member states and institutions have increasingly relied on various forms of remote tracking, including the use of drones for the purposes of monitoring frontier zones. In combination with other facets of the EU border management regime (such as transnational databases and biometrics), these technologies coalesce into a system of governance that has enabled intervention into neighboring territories and territorial waters of other states to track and target migrants for interception in the “prefrontier.” For jurisdictional reasons, this practice effectively precludes the enforcement of legal human rights obligations, which European states might otherwise have with regard to these persons. This article argues that this technologically mediated expansion of vision has become a key feature of post–cold war governance of borders in Europe. The concept of transterritory is proposed to capture its effects.

Data Matters: The Politics and Practices of Digital Border and Migration Management

“…Vis-à-vis these developments, scholars have over the past years started to explore the ways in which technologies of border control are being designed and developed (Bourne, Johnson, and Lisle 2015;Lisle 2018;Noori 2018) and how they become implemented into already existing infrastructures and policies (Glouftsios 2018;Jeandesboz 2016;Leese 2018). A particular focus has been put on large-scale information systems and interoperability (Broeders 2007;Broeders and Hampshire 2013;Leese 2020, this issue), reinforcing the diagnosis that borders are multiplying and extending their functionalities towards the inside and the outside of the territory (Bigo 2008;Follis 2017;Walters 2002). The European databases for border control and migration management are an apt example of these tendencies.…”

Patrols, records and pictures: Demonstrations of Europe in the midst of migration’s crisis

“…In recent years, a common concern named ‘migration crisis’ became such a worldly event: a far-flung array of movements, anticipations, struggles and interventions concerning the future lives of millions that provoked and accelerated entanglements of data practices into new configurations (Feldman, 2011; Follis, 2017; Heller and Pezzani, 2016). The subsequent analysis of ways in which Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ involved and elaborated data practices is intended to show how, at each step of the way, visualising migration is immediately implicated in the unfolding of events that erratically made up ‘crisis’.…”

“…Critical dissections of migration politics and the professed ‘control’ of borders by worldly authorities have highlighted the particular, often disfiguring ways in which migration is rendered visible to us (Amoore, 2013; De Genova, 2013; Feldman, 2011; Follis, 2017; M’Charek et al., 2014; Tazzioli, 2014; Tazzioli and Walters, 2016; Vigneswaran, 2013; Walters, 2009). Such analyses bring out the sovereign, governmental and representational aspects of migration’s visuality, establishing the profound entanglement between visibility of and power over migration and its subjects.…”

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

“…The digitization of border and migration management has moreover been examined as the formation of an “administrative ecology” (Dijstelbloem and Broeders 2015) that calls for exploring the hidden scripts of a violent border regime. Migrations are brought into being and rendered governable through practices of inscription and visualization (Dijstelbloem, van Reekum, and Schinkel 2017; van Reekum 2019; Pezzani and Heller 2019; Follis 2017). At the same time, infrastructures also “reveal and […] perform broader legislative, political and administrative transformations in the European bureaucratic order” (Pelizza 2020, 263).…”