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Scenario
!
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
13 (2) pp. 133-154 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net
2022
Borders, Migration, and Technology in
the Age of Security: Intervening with STS
Paul Trauttmansdorff
University of Bologna
Abstract: In recent years, a broad and multidisciplinary literature has
emerged at the intersection of critical border and migration studies, critical
security studies, and science and technologies studies (STS). This literature
has produced a rich conceptual repertoire for the analysis of digital tech-
nologies and infrastructures of border control and mobility governance.
This scenario conceptually maps some of the core strands in this debate,
which portray borders as complex and multi-located arrangements that
create spaces of control and circulation, notions and images of “trusted”
and/or “risky” travelers, and a globalized hierarchy of mobility rights. Fur-
thermore, the scenario reflects on some major research avenues for STS
to intervene in this debate and expose how border regimes are today imag-
ined, designed, maintained, and critiqued.
Keywords: border studies; migration studies; security studies; border mul-
tiple; data infrastructures.
Submitted: October 21, 2022 – Accepted: December 14, 2022
Corresponding author: Paul Trauttmansdorff, Department of Philosophy
and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Via Zamboni, 38, 40126
Bologna (BO), Italy. E-mail: paul.trauttmansdorff@unibo.it
1. Introduction!
Borders have long been subject to theoretical and empirical scrutiny.
However, geography and political science scholars, sociologists, anthro-
pologists, or philosophers have been unwilling to provide a satisfying an-
swer to the question: What is a border? Balibar has offered a straightfor-
ward reason for this:
Basically, because we cannot attribute to the border an essence which
would be valid in all places and at all times, for all physical scales and time
Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)
134
periods, and which would be included in the same way in all individual
and collective experience. (2002, 75)
The Roman limes had little to do with today’s sophisticated, milita-
rized, high-tech borders that have emerged primarily in the Global
North. Dijstelbloem observes that although the term “expresses delimita-
tion and demarcation, it remains a concept with few limits” (2021, 1).
The point is that borders are transforming entities in both their material
and symbolic aspects: “[f]or most part of human history, the border was
a peripheral thing, [… a] forgotten, far-flung place. Today, it is the center
of the political world” (Longo 2017, xii).
This scenario acknowledges – much like the broad spectrum of schol-
arship at the intersection of critical border and migration studies – the
analytical productivity of Balibar’s observations that the border today
seems to be overdetermined, polysemic, heterogeneous, and ubiquitous
(2002, 97-85). I will not revisit these claims but summarize some domi-
nant conceptual elements that have emerged from the contemporary
analyses of (digital) border regimes and their operations and revolve
around the idea of the border multiple and the securitization of mobile
bodies – as outlined in the first part of this scenario. The second part re-
flects on three analytical angles through which STS may intervene here:
enactment, infrastructure, imaginaries. This scenario thus aims to provide
an orientation to scholars which, in whatever different ways, wish to pos-
tulate a more symmetrical understanding of human agency and material
structure and explore borders as the socio-material entanglements of
people, policies, movements, practices, technologies and artifacts.
!
!
2. Unpacking the Border Multiple
!
Today’s borders are dislocated. Border crossing points, such as the
airport in Vienna, may have very different appearances but are nonethe-
less intimately connected with the militarized maritime frontiers of the
EU, and the seemingly unbounded, natural sea stands out as a border
zone conditioned to kill (Heller and Pezzani 2017). Exploring borders as
multiple and polymorphous can be a starting point for grasping broader
political and social transformations and revealing power dynamics and
mechanisms. “Borderings,” a term used in plural by Saskia Sassen, “cut
across traditional borders and become evident both globally and inside
national territory” (2015, 23), revealing the shifts in state sovereignty and
territoriality in globalization processes. Likewise, border studies have
proposed exploring the heterogeneous sites, at which borders become
manifest as institutions of categorization and in- or exclusion as well as in
“formal, practical, and popular performances of sovereignty” (Johnson et
al. 2011, 66). It has become a common denominator to perceive borders
Trauttmansdorff
135
as multiplicities that require a range of concepts to grasp their social, cul-
tural, political, symbolic, and material facets and functions (Paasi 1998;
Rumford 2006; Walters 2006). Rumford suggests “seeing like a border”
by embarking on a multiperspectival study that takes into account “those
at, on, or shaping the border” and calls for acknowledging “the constitu-
tive nature of borders in social and political life” (2012, 897). In other
words, the border can be something like an epistemic prism for analyzing
power transformations and dynamics:
It is above all a question of politics, about the kinds of social worlds and
subjectivities produced at the border and the ways that thought and
knowledge can intervene in these processes of production. (Mezzadra and
Neilson 2013, 17)
2.1 The Biopolitical Turn
The specific character of borders and their modes of governance in
the world have fundamentally changed over time. The multidisciplinary
field of border studies grew rapidly in the early nineties after the demise
of one of the most notorious border architectures in history – the iron
curtain. It found its agenda in, and against, popularized ideas such as a
borderless world and deterritorialization. The Ashgate Research Compan-
ion to Border Studies introduces the field by noting that after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, “[i]n summary, borders are still ubiquitous, are mani-
fested in diverse ways, and have various functions and roles” (Wastl-
Walter 2011, 2). A variety of terms – borderscapes, borderlands, and bor-
der regimes – have sought to grasp the diverse and various manifestations,
shifts, and roles of borders. As Hess and Kasparek argue, border studies:
emphasize the transformation of the border from a demarcation line sur-
rounding national territory to an ubiquitous, techno-social, deterritorial-
ised apparatus or regime producing geographical stretched borderscapes.
(2017, 57)
Such notions challenge the linear and fixed imaginations of borders,
instead turning our attention to their multi-location. The idea of border-
lands, for instance, points to the phenomena of whole countries or re-
gions becoming zones of transition and no longer having territorial fixity
(Balibar 2009; Rumford 2006; Squire 2011). Even more widely in use is
the concept of borderscapes, which has been mobilized as an epistemic
viewpoint for exploring the border’s distinct spatial, temporal, and politi-
cal dimensions to uncover the hidden geographies and distributions of
categories of belonging (Dell’Agnese and Szary 2015; Rajaram and
Grundy-Warr 2007). Borders, as Longo aptly notes, “cannot merely be
‘tall,’ they must also be ‘wide’ and ‘layered’” (2017, 56).
Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)
136
A key component in summarizing some of these transformations of
borders is the biopolitical turn. It articulates the “multiplicity and multi-
plication of biopolitical technologies” for the management of mobility
and migration (Aradau and Tazzioli 2020, 201). The biopolitical term in-
vokes, perhaps most clearly, the shift in the state’s primary concern with
territory to that of population. Foucault (2009) depicted this shift initially
by developing his concept of security, tracing biopolitics as a form of
governance back to the development of towns in the eighteenth century
when the problem of regulating and surveilling populations was first en-
countered. The objective of governance changed from being concerned
with territorial domination to the challenge of managing the influx and
circulation of populations: governance became a matter of:
organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a divi-
sion between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circula-
tion by diminishing the bad. (2009, 18)
Employed to analyze the institution of the border, these insights help
to scrutinize the distinct techniques and mechanisms of borders, which
aim to include and exclude an “indefinite series of mobile elements” that
originate outside the field of surveillance: “carts, travelers, thieves, dis-
ease, tourists, migrants, criminals” (Feldman 2011, 381). While still pre-
dominantly focused on the Global North, the literature’s verdict is that
the principle of biopolitics seems to have supplemented (but not re-
placed) the principle of geopolitics: borders have operated through spa-
tially dispersed and temporally varied tactics of control, semantics, poli-
cies, laws, and technical architectures (see Olwig et al. 2019; Schwertl
2018; van Baar 2017; Tazzioli 2020). Consequentially, Walters (2002)
conceived the notion of the biopolitical border and acknowledged what he
calls a process of biopoliticization:
the political concerns, events, and means by which the border will become a
privileged instrument in the systematic regulation of national and transna-
tional populations – their movement, health, and security. (2002, 571)
2.2 Digital Transformations
Unsurprisingly, it has been suggested that the rise of large-scale IT
systems and digital technologies has enabled, facilitated, or intensified
this biopolitical turn. Borders, as Dijstelbloem observes,
have a particular relationship with technology. […] Technologies inform
– and limit – how societies are governed and can be imagined to be gov-
erned. (2021, 9)
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137
The interdisciplinary scholarship has gone to great lengths to unpack
the distinct actors, discourses, facets, and functions that carry out today’s
digitally mediated border controls. Databases intensify what Bonditti
(2004) calls the traceability. The growing production, collection, and
storage of data seek to capture and trace the movement and trajectories
of populations, enabling a new form of digital hyper-documentation by
which “each piece of data is linked to other data, and ultimately to a risk
profile” (Salter 2006a, 47). Longo likewise observes a “renewed commit-
ment to us[ing] and deploy[ing] technology at the border” (2017, 56)
and ties the emergence and proliferation of databases targeting mobility
closely to the performance of biopower. The governmental desire for
traceability is thus particularly articulated by the new means of biometric
identification, the digitization of asylum and visa procedures, the creation
of traveler watch lists or blacklists, and other related mechanisms that
track mobilities. Such practices of digital bordering illustrate the shift
away from the territorial model of the sovereign border to an increasingly
supranational character of mobility control.
The increase in the literature on border and migration control
through digital means is also responsible for the proliferation of terms
that seem to describe similar, but not identical, phenomena. Scholars
have described digital borders (e.g., Broeders 2007; Trauttmansdorff
2017; Glouftsios 2019), technological borders (Dijstelbloem and Meijer
2011), and socio-digital borders (König 2016). Another influential term is
Amoore’s biometric border (Amoore 2006; Muller 2011), defined as the:
portable border par excellence, carried by mobile bodies […] as it is de-
ployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway sta-
tions, on subways or city streets, in the office or the neighbourhood.
(Amoore 2006, 338)
Amoore underscored the diffuse character of biometric control in the
contemporary regimes of mobility management, in which facial images,
iris scans, and fingerprints seek to establish the migrant’s embodied iden-
tity (van der Ploeg 2000). In less specific ways, the notions of mobile bor-
ders (Szary and Giraut 2015) and Côté-Boucher’s (2008) diffuse border
also imply delocalized and spatially diffused characteristics of borders
and their biometric reinforcement. Scholars have deployed the idea of the
“virtual border” (Zureik and Salter 2006) or the related concept of “bio-
informatic border security” (Vukov and Sheller 2013) that mark the shift
in borders away from physical or territorial boundaries. Pötzsch’s (2015)
idea of iBorder likewise seeks to signal the exercise of informational pow-
er that digital technologies seemingly enable, as does Rygiel’s (2011) poli-
tics of e-borders. Finally, we add the term liquid borders (Moraña 2021) to
this growing list of signifiers, which, importantly, also acknowledges the
Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)
138
element of porousness that haunts every border, no matter how technolo-
gized and secured it appears.
It is important to note that these labels are not merely academic con-
cepts; some have also been actively introduced or used by politicians, of-
ficials, or industrial actors who strongly promote the development of dig-
ital bordering practices. In this regard, the smart border stands out as a
term that has shaped the discourse and practice of border and migration
management policy. Smart borders have thus come under special aca-
demic scrutiny (Amoore, Marmura and Salter 2008; Leese 2016; Son-
towski 2018; Sparke 2006). This euphemistic and homonymous termi-
nology should not be seen as an accidental outcome but one that has stra-
tegically served industry actors, officials, and experts in fostering and le-
gitimizing the underlying visions and meanings of (digital) border securi-
ty. It does not necessarily mean to refute these notions or to offer a new
term. Instead, we should be cautious of some of the unintended effects of
many of these notions, i.e., the artificial dichotomy that is invoked be-
tween the digital and the physical, the seamless virtual and the robust ma-
terial. Such dichotomies prevent us from examining the distinct ways and
forms in which technologies, devices, artifacts, and the so-called virtual
spaces are continuously shaped by social, cultural, economic, and politi-
cal worlds and always enacted through actors, discourse, and materials.
As Ruppert, Law, and Savage note, social scientists should account for
the ways in which “digital devices themselves are materially implicated in
the production and performance of contemporary sociality” (2013, 22).
As much as the biopolitical turn shifts the analytical gaze away from the
border as a demarcating line, it becomes necessary to be attuned to the
multiple enactments of borders and border security which may take place
prior to or after their deployment at the state’s territorial boundary
(Bourne, Johnson and Lisle 2015; Martin-Mazé and Perret 2021) – i.e., the
spaces in which digital borders become not only imagined, designed, and
assembled but also monitored, maintained, and repaired. This viewpoint
proposes exploring border control and security through deliberate ethno-
graphic fieldwork that can investigate the stickiness of lasting imaginations
and narratives as well as the material practices of creating and maintaining
borders. As a large body of work has devoted itself to the biopolitical char-
acter, its functions, and mechanisms of digitally mediated borders, contri-
butions have thus started to analyze both the imaginative and infrastructur-
al work that is carried out to design and enact digital borders.
Trauttmansdorff
139
3. Digital Border Surveillance and the Securitization of the
Mobile Body
!
3.1 Securitization and Externalization
In the tradition of critical security studies, technologies and databases
have been prominently described as being part of the intensifying process
of securitizing migration – an umbrella concept that traces, in manifold
ways, how mobility and immigration have come to be constructed as a
problem of security, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks
(Bigo 2002; Amoore 2006; Bello 2022; Huysmans 2000; van Munster
2009). Broadly, (digital) technology is explained here as a core driver in
creating the conditions for mass surveillance and perpetuating the logic
of risk in contemporary capitalist societies. It has tied border protection
and migration management permanently to the question of global
(in)security: security professionals, politicians, and bureaucrats envision
their security policies and strategies on a global scale while embedding
them deeply within the fabric of their national societies (Popescu 2011,
92). The multiplication of borders – away from the physical border, be-
yond and within territorial boundaries – strongly relates to checks, sur-
veillance, and controls that occur prior to the traveler’s arrival. This is of-
ten referred to as the externalization of border security, which has been
extensively discussed in the face of the European Union’s externalization
strategies (e.g., Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Lavenex 2006; Zaiotti 2016).
Externalization is closely associated with what Zolberg once called re-
mote control – the “projection of the country of destination’s borders into
the world at large” (2006, 223-24). For instance, analyses have examined
what EU states euphemistically call the “forward-looking” visa policies
which have fundamentally transformed the visa regime into a transna-
tional model of governance through information networks (Salter 2006b;
Salter and Mutlu 2013). The digitization of bordering practices has con-
siderably refined this work of remote control (through the storage and
processing of data doubles) and sought to restrict movement at a dis-
tance, subjecting mobile individuals to enrolment procedures long before
they embark on their journey. Broeders and Hampshire summarize this
claiming “[t]he governance of border traffic in the digital age is evolving
into a multi-sited system of remote control” (2013, 1207).
Most of these contributions confirm a more general observation –
namely, that border control faces the fundamental problem of guarantee-
ing security and enforcing control, on the one hand, and facilitating mo-
bility and global flows on the other. This paradox articulates the general
contradiction between securitization and (neo)liberal globalization
(Amoore 2006), or what Popescu calls “globalization’s security dilemma”
(2011, 100). But scholars tend to ignore the fact that officials, policymak-
ers, or bureaucrats can be perfectly aware of these issues. They inform
Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)
140
the imaginative and narrative repertoires that justify the investments in
deploying digital borders and thereby reproducing technological solu-
tionism – the belief that border security is a problem or dilemma that
may be reconciled through digital technologies and growing databases.
The category of the mobile body is an essential part of this solution – it
must be captured and identified to assess its potential risk, ideally before
it reaches the border, and it must be sorted accordingly so as not to dis-
rupt the flow of legitimate traffic (Follis 2017; Suchman, Follis and We-
ber 2017). Contemporary processes of securitization and surveillance at
the border have thus sought to proliferate and diversify traveler catego-
ries, which are granted different rights and ease of mobility and border
crossing. The way in which we experience movement today follows the
principle of what Adey (2006) aptly summarizes as divided we move.
3.2 Mobile Bodies: Identification, Translation, Informatization
Border (in)security has also been explored through the lens of the
(surveillant) assemblage (see Allen and Vollmer 2018; Dijstelbloem and
Broeders 2015; Sohn 2016; Tsianos and Kuster 2016) – described as the
way in which societies are governed through the production of data dou-
bles, which circulate through different centers of calculation with increas-
ing speed and across networked space. In the context of EU databases,
Kuster and Tsianos (2016) provide an exemplary approach in their study
on the Eurodac system, mobilizing Latour’s idea of immutable mobiles to
show how migrants are forced to register their fingerprints to produce
data doubles that are both immutable and hypermobile across virtual
networks. In their own words, it is an attempt “to liquefy and freeze mu-
table, alterable, fluctuating, and varying corporealities” (2016, 59). The
human body is especially highlighted in the conceptualization of digital
bordering in terms of surveillant assemblages: the body is perceived as
the primary object of biopoliticization. Popescu has noted that it is, in
fact, the body itself that makes an “ideal border”: “always at hand, ready
to be performed whenever circumstances require” (2011, 103). Likewise,
Amoore’s notion of the biometric border centers on the body as the locus
of the modern state’s exercise of biopower: “the body itself is inscribed
with, and demarcates, a continual crossing of multiple encoded borders –
social, legal, gendered, racialized and so on” (2006, 337). Less evident
and often neglected in this scholarship are the very complex and far-
from-evident processes, policies, and practices through which the border
can become inscribed onto the body. If the multi-located realm of border
control is now relocated in the mobile bodies of travelers, what exactly
are the arduous and costly forms of labor and resources that are required
by a vast array of actors and institutions? Additionally, we find less con-
tributions that study how these ideas, which underpin various policies
and governmental strategies, are repeatedly impeded by people on the
Trauttmansdorff
141
move. There are constant frictions, failure, and resistance to the processes
of convergence between the body and the border, which characterize the
diverse patterns of mobility.
One might take into account, like Annalisa Pelizza (2021), the com-
plex procedures of translation. Studying travelers, migrants, or refugees’
encounters with borders, as Pelizza argues, requires a translational ap-
proach in order to consider the multiple and heterogeneous actors in-
volved in bordering as a performative production of identity. Two related
concepts can here discuss the central position of the body-as-border in
more complex ways: informatization of the body and embodied identity.
Drawing on the case of the biometric identification, Irma van der Ploeg
has argued that biometric identification informatizes the body, i.e., it col-
lects not only information about the body but screens the body-as-
information (van der Ploeg 2000, 2005; Pollozek and Passoth 2019). She
claims that the practices of identification do not determine preexisting
identities but establish what she calls machine-readable embodied identi-
ty. This production of illegalized bodies has far-reaching consequences
for what we understand as bodily integrity: it radically erases “the space
between the person and the identifier” (van der Ploeg 2000, 301). It is
the space that defines not only the distribution of power between the
state (authorities) and mobile individuals but also the degree to which
gendered and racialized bodily differences are enacted and potentially
intensified (Kloppenburg and van der Ploeg 2020; M’charek, Schramm,
and Skinner 2014). The production of identity at the border, with its in-
extricable connection to the human body, proves that bodies have be-
come organized and deployed as evidence to recognize, categorize, classi-
fy, and manage human life itself: bodies are treated as “the origin of evi-
dence and the target of evidence-based interventions” (Maguire, Rao, and
Nils 2018, 4; see also Leese, Noori, and Scheel 2022). There is a further
need to explore the developments of such regimes of evidence and how
they are re-imagined and reperformed in the technopolitics of border re-
gimes – continuing to enter the policies and practices of digital bordering.
4. Advancing STS at the Border
!
The conceptual strands outlined above portray borders as complex
and multi-located arrangements that create spaces of control and circula-
tion, notions and images of “trusted” and “risky” travelers, and a global-
ized hierarchy of mobility rights. Borders and their infrastructures have
become expressions of the increasing (in)securitization and surveillance
of mobility, which have targeted and digitized mobile bodies for the pur-
poses of social categorization and sorting. I will now describe three im-
portant STS perspectives that build on and expand these insights, pri-
marily by postulating a more symmetrical understanding of human agen-
Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)
142
cy and material structure as well as a situated understanding of migration
and border control, which aim to expose the complex socio-material en-
tanglements of people, policies, practices, technologies and artifacts.
4.1 Enacting Migration and (Non-)Knowledge
A perennial concern in STS is the relationship between knowledge
and order. Knowledge-making practices – from designing policies and
conducting experiments to collecting and visualizing data – are essential
for articulating and framing order; knowledge and order reinforce each
other’s existence (Jasanoff 2004). In line with this principled understand-
ing, Scheel, Ruppert, and Ustek-Spilda (2019) introduced their special
issue, “Enacting Migration Through Data Practices,” in which they call
for studying the onto-politics of data practices – i.e., the performative and
political implications of border regimes’ data practices that make migra-
tion knowable and governable (see also Leese, Noori and Scheel 2022).
They postulate that migration must be enacted:
as a single, coherent, measurable reality that can be ordered according to
certain policy objectives through data practices. (Scheel, Ruppert and
Ustek-Spilda 2019, 585)
The same can be said about surveillance infrastructures – radars,
drones, vessels, satellites – as they render visible (or invisible) specific
forms and patterns of movement. In particular, scholars emphasize the
practices and technologies of (in)visibilization that produce knowledge
about certain people and their movements, as Tazzioli and Walters argue:
[M]igration visibility works not only as a means of surveillance and con-
trol but more importantly as a way of producing knowledge on migration
and migrants. (2016, 454)
However, it is also the production of ignorance and nonknowledge –
from omission, mistakes, or deliberate deflection – that shape discourses
and practices in the governance of mobility (Aradau and Perret 2022;
Ustek-Spilda 2020). In other words, knowledge and data do not simply
represent; “[d]ata enacts that which it represents” (Ruppert, Isin and
Bigo 2017, 1), which is a performative process that intervenes in the poli-
tics of bordering. At the same time, the techniques of data extraction and
collection at the border, and the knowledge they produce, are controversial
and contested procedures – they are inherently technopolitical (see Pezzani
and Heller 2019; Plájás, M’charek and van Baar 2019; van Reekum 2019).
Thus far, most studies have focused how technologies of datafication
have been shaped and used by various border constellations, scrutinizing
(non)knowledge production at the border. However, knowledge and rep-
resentation also take place before the border. Recent research has been
Trauttmansdorff
143
conducted on the technoscientific/industrial sites in which (future) bor-
ders are designed, conceptually emerging from the discussions, visions,
and negotiations between various actors such as technicians, engineers,
scientists, corporate industry representatives, and security professionals
(Baird 2018; Binder 2020; Lemberg-Pedersen 2013; Martin-Mazé and
Perret 2021; Schwertl 2018; Valdivia et al. 2022). The new border data-
bases created in the EU, for example, have emerged under conditions
that were shaped by funding programs and research and development
programs, stakeholder and industry conferences, or in scientific laborato-
ries. Bourne, Johnson, and Lisle provide a meticulous account of how la-
boratory practices stabilize the (future) border, supported by the promis-
es, norms, and values of a variety of actors, i.e.,
in the mediations of scientists, end-users, materials, international stand-
ards and policies, laboratory practices, immaterial imaginations, and
phantasmic figures as they circulate and combine with wider forces of po-
litical economy. (2015, 309)
This emphasis on the performative processes of (non)knowledge-
making addresses an important critique of the securitization and surveil-
lance literature, which too often have invoked a rather instrumental un-
derstanding of technologies in bordering processes. They had often been
described as part of a broader rationale (of security or surveillance) that
forms a somewhat somber background for political goals and public poli-
cy. The performative turn, so to say, allows to see how knowledge-
making is instead subjected to the multiple interests and actors in border
regimes, as well as the confusion, contestation, failures, and the
(un)intended consequences of their design.!
4.2 Infrastructuring Borders and Migration
One of the most intriguing STS-informed strands in the border and
migration literature conceptually focuses on infrastructuring. Anthropol-
ogists such as Lin, Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh have proposed to analyze
migration through the lens of infrastructure, allowing them to:
[shift] away from the people who move […] towards those human and
nonhuman actors that move migrants within specific infrastructural
frames. (Lin et al. 2017, 169; see also Xiang and Lindquist 2014).
STS scholars likewise mobilize this concept to study how infrastruc-
ture mediates and engenders the work that:
configure[s] actors, elements and their relations, organize[s] access, in-
corporate[s] political agendas, and treat[s] some issues as irrelevant. (Pol-
lozek and Passoth 2019, 619)
Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)
144
This line of research recommends considering the subtle modes,
techniques, or strategies for moving people as infrastructuring (i.e., as a
verb). The conceptual shift seeks to grasp the manifold and dynamic con-
stellations of the involved actors, practices, artifacts, technologies, but
also the narratives through which people become digitized, filed, and
processed – in short, it highlights the materiality of migration governance
as a meticulous organization of mobility across space and time.
Infrastructures embody the entanglements that connect the digital
and the physical; they shape new relationships between authorities and
technology, mobility and control, and states and people. Bellanova and
Glouftsios, for instance, have illustrated how EU databases “bring to-
gether hardware, software and users” and advance what they call “the
flickering foundations of the Schengen Area as a controlled space”
(2022a, 170). As infrastructures, databases serve as powerful enablers of
networked control, but they are also highly fragile as their ever-growing
capacity for knowledge circulation is constantly undermined by technical
failures and breakdowns (Bellanova and de Goede 2022; Glouftsios
2021). Such understandings prevent us from seeing border control as enforc-
ing the ever-present and all-seeing panoptic gaze on mobility. Digital borders
are not the durable, robust artifacts and instruments they are often portrayed
to be. Instead, the lens of infrastructure renders the border a provisional, in-
complete patchwork (Tazzioli and Walters 2016; Dijstelbloem 2017). They
require an enormous amount of harmonization and standardization – a con-
stant concern for the actors involved in the governance of migration and part
of the painstaking labor that must go into assembling, maintaining, and ex-
tending the spaces of security (Leese 2018; Walters 2011).
Infrastructures have thus significantly expanded the repertoire to
problematize border and migration control. Their operations require
continuous work – from the imagining and symbolically representing ep-
istemic and material orders, to their meticulous design and the mainte-
nance labor that goes into upholding their underlying networks (Laus-
berg and Pelizza 2021). It directs our attention to a variety of bordering
work that is “dependent upon relatively regulated sequences of interpre-
tation and movement” (De Goede 2018, 27; see also van Reekum 2019).
Furthermore, infrastructures of border control host multiple encounters
between technologies and the movements of people, who subvert, sabo-
tage, escape, or appropriate them. For STS scholars, infrastructuring
borders and migration emerges as essential but contingent practices of
how mobile populations are inscribed into IT systems or converted into
“legible” identities (Pelizza 2020; Van Rossem and Pelizza 2022). These
processes become inevitably tied to the construction of the state or trans-
national institutions (Amelung et al. 2020; Dijstelbloem 2021; Pelizza
2020). The infrastructure’s capacity to process alterity, in Pelizza’s words,
emerges as an integral part of institutional orders, underpinning the ra-
tionales and practices of categories of belonging and social sorting.
Trauttmansdorff
145
4.3 Imagining Future Borders, Imagining Alternative Futures
Most contributions in this line of research analytically focus on the
techno-material aspects of infrastructuring. At times, this comes at the
expense of the collective meanings, promises, and visions that any mate-
rial infrastructure acquires and embodies to exert its power of
b/ordering. The distinct imaginative capacities, the ability to craft visions
of the future, the mobilization of visionary powers – in short, the collec-
tive forms of sociotechnical imagination have often been omitted from
existing accounts but are key to understanding the formation of borders
and their infrastructures. Borders must be imagined and represented up-
stream by policy experts, border guards, and other epistemic communi-
ties, e.g., at policy gatherings, roundtables, conferences or other spaces
where actors meet and engage in the laborious work of envisioning, per-
forming, and justifying digital borders and their solutionist promises.
Such spaces enable us to scrutinize also how expertise and expert author-
ity are forged and infused into policymaking processes in the border re-
gime (Martins and Jumbert 2020; Trauttmansdorff 2022). Scholars have
thus begun to unearth the collective visions and their relationships with
processes of (digital) infrastructuring, i.e., how infrastructures embody spe-
cific political visions (Aradau 2010; Leese 2022) or what anxieties and fears
inform their design and formatting (Bellanova and Glouftsios 2022b).
STS-informed works may further explore the collectively imagined fu-
tures that guide individuals and societies in organizing their regimes of
border security and migration control. Futures drive social groups and
communities toward specific designs and applications of technologies,
the definition and production of calculable risks, discourses of fear and
threat, protection and exclusion. Industry roundtables, policy meetings,
and international security conferences are examples of the powerful tools
of political communication and imagination by state authorities. They
create the epistemological conditions in which the local and complex re-
alities of migration can be largely ignored, instead focusing on what is
framed as techno-scientifically achievable in the future. The future acts
here as an “epistemic orientation” and a “moral imperative, a will to an-
ticipate” (Adams, Murphy and Clarke 2009, 254) – directing and shaping
knowledges toward speculative forecast and prediction, mobilizing the
present as a space of opportunity. Futures are thus seldomly couched on-
ly in progressivist terms but routinely invoked with ideas of “crisis” and
“emergency.” They naturalize and affirm the challenges to social/political
order while calling for technological fix. Such framings appear frequently
alongside technoscientific futures and, as in the case of the EU, have also
repeatedly justified the continuous buildup and implementation of large-
scale IT systems for border control (Trauttmansdorff and Felt 2021;
Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins 2016; Stierl et al. 2016).
Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)
146
Focusing on the imaginability of future borders thus perceives trans-
formations in border and migration control regimes as always changing
and prospective processes. It inevitably reflects on the technopolitical or-
ders of societies and their boundary-making practices. But it also raises
the question about alternative futures and alternative migration infra-
structures (see Mora-Gámez 2020) that seek to counter the inequalities
and violence of contemporary borders. Scholars have repeatedly cri-
tiqued some of the prevalent imaginations and justifications of “smart”
and “deep” borders (Amoore 2021) – technoscientific visions that propa-
gate the seamless inclusion of travelers in the profitable circuits of mobili-
ty but rely on the arbitrary detainment and brutal banishment of human
beings. They have also critiqued the political imperative to expand IT
systems and the fervent solutionist belief in the unfettered power of data,
on which today’s mobilities hierarchies and inequalities rest upon. It re-
mains an open task however to reimagine and design futures that not only
reject the violent responses to the realities of migration, but also to nur-
ture a politics of responsibility and rights – a politics that involves actors
in genuine deliberation about how to create accountability for the injus-
tices and violence that occur at today’s borders and works towards a gen-
uine form of mobility justice.
5. Conclusions
!
The scenario has offered a specific reading of some important concep-
tual threads in the analyses of (digital) border regimes, departing from
the observation about the border multiple. Its aim was to carve out the
complementarity of critical border and migration studies and STS but
also to suggest some possible analytical vantage points that can be further
leveraged, i.e., by investigating how border/migration knowledges are en-
acted, conceptualizing borders as infrastructure(s), or exploring imagi-
naries of (future) border and migration control. All these perspectives
understand borders as formed in complex and laborious ways; as repeat-
edly crossed and resisted against; as complex, sociotechnical patchworks
of different forms of movements, technologies, desires, and practices.
STS-informed studies therefore treat borders as processes of assemblage
and translation. Such conceptualizations will always question and trans-
gress what state officials, policymakers, or private companies in border
regimes represent as stable, clear-cut, seamless, or fixed entities. STS per-
spectives can contribute not only to depict borders as fuzzy, fluid, and
ambiguous but also challenge what borders must delimit and demarcate
as institutionalized within regimes of control and power: the idea of sta-
ble referents such as the nation-state, a single geography, a homogenous
people, or collective security.
Trauttmansdorff
147
Acknowledgements
!
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the re-
search, authorship, and/or publication of this article: this article was written in
the context of the “Processing Citizenship” project, which has received funding
from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Hori-
zon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 714463.
Parts of this text also draw from the author’s research in the context of his PhD
thesis “Imagining, enacting, and justifying future borders” at the Faculty of Social
Sciences, University of Vienna, Austria.
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