Chapter 1
The relatively innocuous abbreviation “LISA” has been chosen in contrast to another infamous acronym associated with a European Union Agency, “FRONTEX”. This latter acronym, with its rather martial connotations stemming from the French phrase for external borders, “frontières extérieures”, and its practice of naming operations after Greek gods like Poseidon and Triton, has undoubtedly contributed to the Agency’s notoriety and negative public image.
The terms “Europe” and “European” can be understood in various geographical, regional, political, or cultural ways. Whenever I refer to “Europe” in this book, it will reference the political constitution of Schengen Europe and the borders of the EU as I seek to understand how these formations shape mobility and migration on the continent. I also use “European border regime” when referring to the actors, infrastructures, and practices involved in the bordering of Europe. Border regimes, as conceptualized by numerous scholars in critical migration and border studies, have emphasized the multiple (and often conflicting) interests, actors, institutions, practices, legal regulations, discourses, migratory movements, and material technologies that construct and shape borders. A regime thus denotes the always partial and fragmented field that involves numerous human and nonhuman elements. For an extended discussion about this notion, see, for example, Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Eule, Loher, and Wyss 2018; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008; Tsianos and Karakayali 2010.
The statement is made by the former Executive Director Krum Garkov, who led eu-LISA for almost eight years. On 16 March 2023, the Agency’s second Executive Director Agnès Diallo took office.
For reviews on the development of the field of border studies, see, for example, A Companion to Border Studies (Wilson and Donnan 2016) or Chris Rumford’s insightful article, “Theorizing Borders” (2006a).
The idea of borderlands, for instance, points to the phenomena of whole countries or regions becoming zones of transition and no longer having territorial fixity (Balibar 2009, 2010; Rumford 2006b; Squire 2011). Even more widely cited is the concept of borderscapes, which is mobilized as an epistemic viewpoint for exploring the performances, practices, and discourses of borders—and their distinct spatial, temporal, and political dimensions—that uncover the hidden geographies and distributions of categories of belonging (see here for example Brambilla 2015; Dell’Agnese and Szary 2015; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007).
For an extended discussion on the biopolitical turn at the intersection of critical border studies and STS, see Trauttmansdorff (2022).
In a widely recited passage, Foucault traces biopolitics as a form of governance back to the development of towns in the eighteenth century when the problem of regulating and
For an overview of these systems, see the Appendix. A system that is less relevant in the border regime and will not be addressed in this book it the so-called e-Codex system. eu-LISA has also begun operating this “e-Justice Communication via Online Data Exchange”, which is the EU’s flagship project to exchange judiciary data among member states.
There is no space here to dwell on the different meanings and implications of these very similar notions, or even on broader concepts such as digitization, although the latter has been done in more recent contributions by Glouftsios and Scheel (2021) and Witteborn (2022). For this book, I make pragmatic use of terms such as “digital borders” when referring to the large-scale border security databases in the EU.
Previous accounts on borders and migration which have emphasized this point in different ways include Bellanova and Glouftsios (2022a), Dijstelbloem (2017, 2021), Feldman (2012), Leese (2018), Pollozek and Passoth (2019),Tazzioli and Walters (2016), or Walters (2011).
Foucault elsewhere defines the apparatus as a dispositif consisting of “strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by types of knowledge” (Foucault in Rabinow 2003, 53). Bussolini (2010) points to this concept’s anticipatory and logistical orientation in referring to its etymology: “Apparatus, or adparatus, from apparo in Latin, refers to a preparation or making ready for something: a furnishing, providing, or equipping. It has the sense of laying in sufficient supplies, provisions or instruments, of establishing a plan to deal with a situation by ensuring the proper supplies” (p. 96). Slota and Bowker’s (2017) definition of infrastructure is also highly reminiscent of what Foucault’s apparatus or dispositif aimed to unravel—“infrastructure,” they argue, “is not so much a single thing as a bundle of heterogeneous things (standards, technological objects, administrative procedures […])—which involves both organizational work as well as technology” (p. 531).
Although now becoming highlighted by STS-influenced scholars on border and migration infrastructures, this aspect is still too often neglected (see Bellanova and Glouftsios 2022a; Dijstelbloem 2021; Glouftsios 2021; Graham and Thrift 2007; Sontowski 2018).
As Foucault (2009) notes, one of the core features of apparatuses is “that one works on the future” and a permanent preoccupation with anticipating and regulating an “indefinite series of events” (p. 20). The very idea, then, of defining security as a problem of managing populations is partly grounded in (re-)imagining the operations, strategies, and techniques that bring it into being as a new form of governmentality. Security, in Foucault’s words, is the “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument” (Foucault 2009, 108). Scholars have often analyzed this central concern with the future in the so-called “war on terror” through the prism of risk (Amoore 2011; Aradau and van Munster 2013; Hall and Mendel 2012; Opitz and Tellmann 2015b).
A vast literature in STS has explored how technological and scientific innovation pursue and shape collective visions and ideals of larger social groups. They crystalize in collectively imagined futures that guide individuals and societies in organizing life and order and articulate “society’s shared understanding of good and evil” (Jasanoff 2015a, 4). Similar things can be said of making material infrastructures (Aarden 2017; Anand, Appel, and
By numbers provided only by the International Organization of Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, there have been over 29,200 missing in the Mediterranean Sea since 2014; see https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean.
Scholars like Taylor, Appadurai, and Anderson have acknowledged this in different ways by framing imagination as an “organized field of social practice”. As Appadurai (2010) claimed, “no longer mere fantasy […], no longer simple escape […], no longer elite pastime […], no longer mere contemplation”, but a central component for the making of new worlds and global orders (p. 31). Likewise, Taylor (2004) anchors the imaginary as an emerging, underpinning fait social of collective social life in Western modernity. It does not merely mark out a set of ideas or beliefs, but rather “is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (p. 2). For Taylor, the imaginary of modernity becomes a socially accepted form of moral and social order, generating a natural sense of legitimacy for institutions such as the modern market economy, the public sphere, or the self-governing of people.
Examples of this strand of work that seeks to capture the perpetual interplay between technology, politics, and society are plenty. They include concepts such as “technological imagination” to study how artistic or political movements such as the Italian futurists were created (Berghaus 2009), or “techno-scientific imaginaries” (Marcus 1995) to grapple with how social knowledges and the materiality of technoscience are mutually entangled. Prasad’s concept of “technocultural imaginaries” (Prasad 2014) points to manifold narratives, desires, and material worlds that interweave the realities and (national) myths in techno-scientific developments. As a space of knowledge-making, laboratory activities, and technical expertise, techno-science is inevitably engrained in local cultures and hierarchical networks of power and administration. Similarly, the anthropologist Marcus (1995) described the “technoscientific imaginaries” to elaborate on “various kinds of scientific practice in their fully embedded social and cultural contexts” (p. 4).
Initially, the modern nation-state has been perceived as a primary unit of analysis to trace the emergence of imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2013). Nations were hereby not conceived as analytical black-boxes or containers, but rather as dynamic formations that needed to be continually (re)imagined and performed along with the projected visions of progress. STS has produced robust literature on national imaginaries, which are particularly germane to the study of large-scale technological innovation operating “as sites of contemporary state-making and societal reconfiguration” (Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017, 788). But sociotechnical imaginaries are also reservoirs of power that are mobilizable by a myriad of collectives on different scales. They can solidify on a global level (Miller 2015), manifest on regional scales, or be translated from supranational into national contexts (Baur 2023; Mager 2017); they can also be carried and promoted by smaller “vanguard” groups (Hilgartner 2015)—for instance, by commercial and industrial collectives (Sadowski and Bendor 2019), professional experts (Ruppert 2018), and global elites (Schiølin 2020).
The conception of imaginaries thereby differs from ideologies in so far that they do not necessarily represent entrenched, explicit systems of ideas and ideals. Nor do they
As reported by the nonprofit organization Statewatch in 2022, eu-LISA was given roughly €1.5 billion between 2014 and 2020 to spend on private contracts and fund the construction of these new systems (Jones, Valdivia, and Kilpatrick 2022). At the 2022 conference organized by eu-LISA, the Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson described the Agency’s growth as a transformation from a “start-up agency at the edge of Europe to the digital heart of the Schengen area in a mere 10 years” (see its report https://eulisaconference.eu/report-2022/#OpeningRemarks). See also Chapter 3, for a brief analysis of the usage of this metaphoric language.
I should mention that I was not granted access to the highly protected site in Sankt Johann im Pongau, Austria, where eu-LISA runs a business continuity site for its IT systems.
Participant lists usually revealed the wide range of actors and institutions that take part in these events, such as EC officials, parliamentary representatives, delegates of foreign and interior ministries, diplomats, representatives of agencies such as the EDPS or FRA, officials from eu-LISA, Frontex, and EUAA (formerly EASO), industry actors, brokers, consultants and IT companies, and researchers.
All quotes from interviews in this book are either in the original English or translated into English by the author.
Chapter 2
Acknowledgement: this chapter is a modified version of a research article written and published together with Ulrike Felt, in Science, Technology, and Human Values 48 (3), available online: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01622439211057523.
See also Chapter 5 and Appendices for a description of how the use of databases has significantly expanded, that is, by gradually extending access opportunities to law-enforcement authorities.
While Tallinn (Estonia) became the city of eu-LISA’s headquarters, French authorities insisted that Strasbourg remained the operational data centre. It had previously hosted both the central systems of SIS II and the Visa Information System. The EC in turn ensured that many of its staff were transferred to the agency, while the member states took the opportunity to recommend their own national bureaucrats to the agency (see also Chapter 4).
This quarterly was published by the International Border Management and Technologies Association, which describes itself as a “not for profit international nongovernmental organization” bringing together experts, practitioners, policy makers, and technology providers (see http://www.ibmata.org/about/).
The eu-LISA pilot study report ultimately claimed that a large-scale biometric system (such as the EES) and its comprehensive enrolment at the Schengen external borders were, in principle, “feasible (in terms of accuracy, effectiveness and impact)” (eu-LISA 2015b, 12).
Second Interlude
“Neue Macht für die obskurste Behörde der EU” by Jannis Brühl, available at https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/fluechtlinge-eurodac-eu-datenbanken-migration-ueberwachung-kriminalitaet-1.4219070, accessed 4 April 2023.
The video can be found online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz3kVrlwcnc, accessed 5 April 2023.
Chapter 3
On this perspective, see, for example, Korn et al. (2019) who argue that infrastructuring offers a “shift of perspective from a structuralist or system theory-led approach that attempts to characterize systems as entities to a practice theory-inspired view on phenomena as results of systematically linked and synchronised practices” (p. 17).
The video is available on eu-LISA’s YouTube channel. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F50ecVl8Chw, Min. 00:13–00:24, accessed 5 April 2023.
This presents an opportunity for smaller states to participate and act alongside more powerful states, such as Germany and France, and alongside big industry players too who manufacture the devices and systems of digital bordering.
See https://estonianworld.com/technology/eus-it-agency-sets-up-in-estonia/, last accessed 5 April 2023. As reported by the online magazine Estonian World, the state had promoted its candidacy for the agency seat long before any draft EU regulation for eu-LISA was presented in 2011. Another magazine called The Baltic Course quoted a former Minister of the Interior on the “symbolic significance” of building the Agency’s headquarters in Tallinn: “This reinforces the image of Estonia as [an] IT capable state […]. It is no less important that the strategic planning team will be located here who will handle the IT systems development work” (The Baltic Course, 11 December 2014). See http://www.baltic-course.com/eng/real_estate/?doc=100028&ins_print&output=d, last accessed 5 April 2023.
Mariam Fraser (2009) discusses this principle in her reflection on Whitehead’s concept of the event (and in conversation with Latour, Stengers, and Deleuze). She notes that “the singularity of an entity is derived from a multiplicity of diverse elements that are inextricably conjoined […] by way of prehensive relations grasped in the unity of an event” (p. 66).
To shed light on both the materiality and movability of borders, Dijstelbloem (2021) deploys the notion of “infrastructural compromise”, stressing that they emerge from all kinds of sociotechnical mediations in the context of border security. He likewise holds that compromises concern the “transformation of conflicting requirements and opposing views into a workable composition by adding new elements, foregrounding certain aspects, and backgrounding others” (p. 32).
Accordingly, the first official to lead eu-LISA’s operational centre was a member of the French police.
This “magic mountain”, as one interviewee called it, had housed a (previously secret) war room called “Einsatzzentrale Basisraum”, designed in the 1970s after the experiences of the Prague Spring when Soviet troops occupied the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Feeling threatened by a potential Soviet attack from the east, Austria’s political leaders decided to set up an emergency government room in the event that Vienna, the capital, was overrun by Soviet troops.
Usually, only individual components or applications need to be switched to the Austrian site and operated remotely from Strasbourg. It is not clear how often these scenarios take place. According to one of my interlocutors, they occur frequently and, at times, for longer periods (Interview 7, 2019).
As scholars have argued, clearing data in the bordering process not only involves complex chains of actions that can incrementally improve data quality but also means sorting out different approaches to what data quality should actually mean (Pelizza 2016b; Pollozek 2020).
This is also one of the reasons why a significant amount of repair work must be outsourced to external contractors: “You know, if you need to fix a bug, then already we would ask the contractor to do it. If it’s more coordination, you know, some issue which is not a technical problem, […] there can be many questions that a help desk needs to reply [to] from member states, too. So, the bulk of the work is for us, but if there are some technical, real[ly] technical details, then we again involve the industry. But these are the same contracts. So it’s not only for building the system but also for maintaining it and fixing it” (Interview 27 with an Agency official, 2019).
Recently, Eileen Murphy Maguire (2023) has convincingly argued that such service management of IT systems has contributed to establishing the legitimacy and authority of the eu-LISA Agency in the EU.
See also this radio interview with an agency representative from 10 October 2020, entitled “Eu-LISA: Strasbourg, le cœur numérique de l’espace Schengen.” Available at https://rcf.fr/actualite/le-grand-invite-alsace?episode=51744, last accessed 5 April 2023. Likewise, eu-LISA’s ten-year Anniversary Conference on 13 October 2022, was titled “10 years as the Digital Heart of Schengen”.
A range of contributions has studied the infrastructural making of Europe (Badenoch and Fickers 2010b; Kaiser and Schot 2014; Misa and Schot 2005; Schipper and Schot 2011). At the same time, contrary to Scott’s hegemonic role of the state, these works have made clear that this process has been shaped by a multiplicity of both state and non-state actors and that “several co-existing Europe-oriented forms of governance overlapped, competed, or sometimes reinforced each other” (Schipper and Schot 2011, 252).
Chapter 4
For more information on the role of private actors working with eu-LISA, see the exceptional report on the Agency’s network of lobbying and industrial groups by Lemberg-Pedersen, Hansen, and Halpern (2020).
A wide range of contributions has been made to the smart border literature. See, for example, Amoore, Marmura, and Salter (2008); Bigo (2011); Côté-Boucher (2008); Leese (2016); Sparke (2006); and Vukov and Sheller (2013), among others. On Europe specifically, Tsianos and Kuster (2016) describe the smart border as an “instrument that enables the deterritorialization of the external European border and potentially extending it to the whole Schengen area” (p. 236). Jeandesboz (2016b) argues that smart borders enhance the mass dataveillance of mobility while promoting the reconcilement between intensified securitization (mobility control) and the increasing imperatives of the global economy (mobility facilitation) (see also Leese 2016). In similar terms, Bigo (2011) contends that smart borders officially foster speed of movement, mobilized as an important economic resource, while at the same time reinforcing control and the banishment of those classified as risky subjects. Finally, Sontowski (2018) identifies this dilemma as one of the reasons smart borders reproblematize “cross-border movements and their control on the level of [… their] various temporalities” (p. 2734).
See the Appendix for additional details about these systems.
On this point, see, for instance, Scheel (2017) who notes that most illegalized migrants in the EU arrive by legal means on a Schengen visa and subsequently become “illegal” upon its expiration.
Both the EES and ETIAS implementations were planned to be completed in 2023, but, at the time of writing, are already expected to be delayed.
In addition, there is usually a speaker from the US, Canada or Australia at eu-LISA roundtables. They serve as an important gateway to the market for transatlantic stakeholders. Generally, there is a long list of examples of conferences and policy meetings at which eu-LISA itself is listed as a speaker and/or participant. This includes, for example, the “Border Security 2021” summit, a conference in the framework of an EU-funded project on facial recognition called the “European Security Summit”. The agency’s participation in these events is usually listed in digital newsletters under the rubric “Happenings”, available at https://eulisa.europa.eu/SiteAssets/Bits-and-Bytes/002.aspx, accessed 5 April 2023.
For example, at an online conference during the COVID-19 pandemic, eu-LISA hired BBC World moderator Joe Lynam for welcome remarks and moderation. This may seem like an attempt to break with routine by employing the services of a professional event moderator, but, in fact, it reinforces this formality, giving a strong impression that the content of the speeches and discourse is less important than its form.
To further illustrate this point, we can refer to an online interview with eu-LISA’s former Executive Director, conducted by eu-LISA and published on its website, entitled “A Leader of a Successful Organization Knows that Progress Never Stops”. Here, Garkov emphasizes the importance of managerial skills and discusses his management background. Available at https://www.eulisa.europa.eu/Newsroom/News/Pages/Leader-Successful-Organisation-Progress-Never-Stops.aspx, accessed 4 April 2023. Likewise, eu-LISA’s new Director Agnès Diallo was introduced as someone with managerial capacities and ties to the industry and consultancies. Diallo served, for instance, as Vice-President of IN Groupe, a well-known French company specialized in document security and had worked for the consultancy McKinsey & Company. See also https://www.eulisa.europa.eu/Newsroom/PressRelease/Pages/Agn%C3%A8s-Diallo-takes-office-as-Executive-Director-of-eu-LISA.aspx, accessed 5 April 2023.
The business card competition also reminds one of Feldman’s observations (2014) at a policy meeting, at which a teddy bear was presented to the host of the upcoming conference meeting. For Feldman, these acts must invoke “Olympic team spirit” (p. 49), but also essentially conceal the general lack thereof.
The first statement was originally written by the sociologist Daniel Bell. The second was taken from Marc Benioff, US investor and owner of the cloud computing company Salesforce.
On the privatization processes in border regimes, see for example Baird (2018); Lemberg-Pedersen (2013, 2018); Binder (2020); Lemberg-Pedersen, Hansen, and Halpern (2020).
In this instance, the term “European” is used as a casual way to describe the borders of the Schengen space, which are repeatedly used metaphorically to invoke the greater political project of a united Europe. See also earlier, in endnote 2 of Chapter 1.
A widespread assumption at all roundtables and conferences—notably before the outbreak of the pandemic—was that global flows of mobility will inevitably increase. Unsurprisingly, the tourism sector was predicted to become one of the fastest-growing sectors of state economies. Seen as a highly profitable but relatively “unproblematic” category of mobility, it would thereafter demand speedier and simplified border checks. Compare this to the argument of an Agency representative who claimed: “[Y]ou cannot […] separate it [anymore …]. You always will have to look to the needs of border management and
Similarly, Torpey (1998) uses the term “sheriff’s deputies” to describe private entities’ participation in controlling movement.
These enrolment processes are not simple. The overall initiative of smart borders depends, to a certain degree, on the private actors that are part of this infrastructural experimentation. One eu-LISA official argued that the “implementation [of smart borders] is not only in the hands of the agency but requires [a] joint effort, […] the integration of all those stakeholders” (field note, Visionbox online event, 30 September 2020). Another representative even admitted that “to be honest, I don’t know how it’s going to work […]. I have some doubts that any train—you know—manager [conductor] is able to check a third-country national. I mean, I hope it will work, but it will be definitely very hard in the beginning” (Interview 28 with EU official, 2019).
In her article on nuclear language, which is my main inspiration for the reflections here, Cohn raises an important point about how abstractions and sexual imagery can fashion a language of nuclear power that disguises the messy, uncontrollable and destructive reality of nuclear weapons.
For a discussion on the increasing logistification of migration and border regimes, see, for example, Moritz Altenried and colleagues (2017, 2018), who see the emergence of this rationality as a new attempt at governing migration to resolve a central contradiction between states’ economic need for (migrant) labour and the politico-cultural logic of shielding nation-states from foreigners. Accordingly, theories and practices of managing migration would be increasingly plagued by a “delivery rationality” and the fantasy of a “just-in-time” and “to-the-point” migration that promotes the integration of labour mobility into national capitalist economies (2018, 299).
On the notion of platformization as an attractive way to signal state-of-the-art thinking in infrastructural and economic terms and as an increasingly dominant model in media and data environments, see Helmond (2015) and Srnicek (2017).
In addition to its connotations in biology, the notion of ecosystems has previously been applied to corporate strategies. See, for example, James F. Moore’s (1998) early article on the rise of a “new corporate form”: ecosystems are defined as “communities of customers, suppliers, lead producers, and other stakeholders interacting with one another to produce goods and services and coevolving capabilities” (p. 168).
For the meeting, eu-LISA also drafted a report by the joint advisory group on the EES that depicted various scenarios at these different locations and how borders were to be crossed there (eu-LISA 2019d).
The practice of “timeboxing” in the implementation of new, large-scale IT systems is a widely recognized, problematic practice in the EU that has led to wholly unrealistic timelines for these implementation plans.
Chapter 5
Acknowledgement: This chapter is derived in part from an article in Critical Policy Studies, 15 November 2022, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19460171.2022.2147851
The EU ultimately adopted two legal regulations on interoperability in May 2019.
Interoperability consists of four main components. The shared Biometric Matching Service (sBMS) underlies all central IT systems in the EU as a joint “engine” that queries and cross-matches data based on biometric templates, such as fingerprints and facial images. The Common Identity Repository (CIR) creates individual files (of extracted data) for every person that is registered in at least one of the databases. The Multiple
Subsequent documents up until 2015 show only a few notable references to interoperability, or in relation to a future Entry-Exit Program. The trajectory was set out in Stronger and Smarter Information Systems (EC 2016a) as well as in another Communication called Enhancing security in a world of mobility: improved information exchange in the fight against terrorism and stronger external borders (EC 2016b).
The 2019 regulations referred to the HLEG as a prime case for which “it was necessary and technically feasible to work towards practical solutions for interoperability” (EU 2019a, 3).
The parliamentarian Cornelia Ernst of the Left in the European Parliament stated, “There evolves a huge, super database with data of third-country nationals […]. Welcome in the brave new world!” (See https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/CRE-8-2019-03-27-ITM-024_EN.html?redirect; accessed 12 April 2023; own translation).
This reasoning was a sort of “legal trick,” as one interviewee admitted, ironically remarking, “to me, it’s a database […] but that’s something you are not supposed to talk about—okay [laughing]?’ (Interview 6 with EU official, 2019).
The votes of the S&D Group provided the EPP with a majority to pass its “flagship file” as official EU law in May 2019.
Matching and verifying can be seen as a series of testing procedures around which a “true” identity must be constructed; identification basically becomes a test based on the “comparison of one body with a multitude of bodies” (Schinkel 2020, 560).
A related problem is data quality, another widely acknowledged source of uncertainty. The report highlights that the issue of “insufficient data and poor data quality” is well-known and will remain so because “interoperability in itself does not lead to improvement in the completeness, accuracy and reliability of data” (LIBE 2018, 51).
Chapter 6
Scholars of valuation have insisted that the study of justification contributes to a better understanding of contemporary transformations, such as digitization, quantification or neoliberalization (Lamont 2012; Mau 2019; Stark 2009).
The definition of “repertoires of justification” stems from the vast literature of Valuation Studies, which usually highlight legitimate orders or justificatory regimes. To describe this “project and innovation repertoire”, I draw particularly on Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (2018 [1999]), in which they thoughtfully trace the various projectivist narratives, ideologies and values. A comprehensive valuography (Dussauge, Helgesson, and Lee 2015) of the digital border regime cannot be offered here, but would certainly have to explore the multiple sets of justifications, values and normative assumptions in the ongoing expansion of border databases. It would thus include several different repertoires of justification, such as a security repertoire, an economic or market repertoire, an industrial repertoire. Such valuography would also have to elaborate on the implicit tensions, inconsistencies and contradictions when repertoires contradict each other.
Accordingly, these are also the actors who mobilize this repertoire of justification most visibly and frequently. It remains less frequently used by actors such as national delegates or operators who are concerned with adapting their practices to new legislation or who must manage IT systems on the ground.
This is reminiscent of Gregory Feldman’s useful remarks (2015, 53–84) about the relationship between “activity” and “connectivity” in neoliberal societies and the process of the atomization of the individual that this results in.
In this report by the Immigrant Defense Project’s Surveillance, Tech & Immigration Policing Project and the Transnational Institute, Aizeki et al. (2021) observe how the rhetoric of smart borders has been broadly embraced by both the Democratic party and moderate Republicans—as if smart borders represent a humane response to border insecurity and an alternative to former US President Donald Trump’s hardline stance on immigration and his obsession with “The Wall” along the US–Mexico border. In short, “there is a belief that a ‘smart’ border—the expansive use of surveillance and monitoring technologies including cameras, drones, biometrics, and motion sensors—offers a humane alternative […]” (p. 4).
Arendt (2017 [1948]) makes this observation about totalitarian ideology that must constantly free itself from individual reason, factuality and experience in an attempt to establish and verify its fiction against the odds of reality and its own inconsistencies. Accordingly, she claims, “Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world” (p. 508). In this sense, individuals are expected to fully conform to totalitarian rule, which seeks to eliminate human spontaneity and individual responsibility. For Arendt, the concentration and extermination camps were the ultimate consequences of the totalitarian quest for complete domination, where its beliefs and ideology had to be enforced with the requisite terror. While I do not want to assess the general validity of Arendt’s claims with regard to the National Socialists’ murderous programme of annihilation, we should also note her use of the metaphor of the laboratory to describe “the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior […]” (pp. 578–579).
See, for example, the report “Death by Rescue” published by the Forensic Architecture project. Available at https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/death-by-rescue-the-lethal-effects-of-non-assistance-at-sea, accessed 7 March 2023.
Chapter 7
See, for example, https://blog.ucsusa.org/derrick-jackson/omicron-in-blackface-racist-us-travel-ban-scapegoats-africa/, accessed 5 April 2022.
See Picum’s report on their website, https://picum.org/covid-19-undocumented-migrants-europe/, accessed 5 April 2022.
Appendices
Statistical data that are used for this overview are accessible on eu-LISA’s official website. See www.eu-LISA.europa.eu.
