federica infantino

For the past 20 years, many stakeholders (researchers, journalists, NGO workers and activists, elected politicians, employees of national administrations and international organizations, etc.) have been observing, documenting, studying and at times condemning the technologization of border controls. Alongside the militarization of borders, traditional control systems are now complemented by the deployment at state borders of increasingly sophisticated technologies (biometrics, robots, walls, integrated surveillance systems, data mining, big data, etc.) to control movements of population groups, goods, capital and information. Analysts of this intensive deployment of technology generally tend to look at the objects of control separately: persons, goods and capital. Yet we should also look into the question of the possible movement and transfer of knowledge and techniques from one of these objects to another. Any analysis of border controls, whatever the object, needs to look at the same questions, namely efficiency, “fraud” and diversion. This conference will, simultaneously and on a cross-cutting basis, consider the technologization of border controls, whether relating to persons, goods or capital.
The technologization of controls is accompanied by both the growing input of data and the mathematization of border procedures and border crossings. “Mathematization” is taken here to mean the progressive representation of borders in an increasingly abstract space, structured by quantitative methods (whether in economics, sociology, etc.), by autonomous information based on its own paradigms (logistics and the need for rapid and lower-cost border crossings) and by a specific form of language (technology as a corpus of knowledge on the techniques and tools of surveillance of persons and objects). That process has given a strong boost to the development of what are known as smart borders programmes, especially in Europe and North America where generalized supervision of all border crossings by persons, goods and capital has been introduced, to satisfy the dual imperative of more fluid movement and the identification of fraud.
So this mathematization of borders gives a representation of their efficiency: algorithms, quantitative studies and technical instruments are used to facilitate human decisions, whether they are about taking the risk of not checking goods that are crossing a border, speeding up the border crossing of objects and persons regarded as safe, anticipating and detecting ‘fraud’, or proposing a scientific analysis of the risk calculation based on the predicted movements of goods and human behaviour.
This mathematization does not involve a temporal (e.g. speed of crossing) or spatial (organization of processes at a specific place such as a point of entry) dimension: it is based on the desire to study the past and imagine the future, to anticipate individual behaviours and practices or the effects of public policies, and to block or ease a border crossing at a specific point, as well as to formulate global governance of trade or security.
This mathematization is also self-nourishing, since its deployment generates the quantitative data necessary to its extension: the surveillance systems are designed to support human decision-making, but at the same time they collect data that make it possible to analyse their own shortcomings and remedy them by the collection of new data. This has led to a growing demand for data on goods and passengers before they cross borders.
Some people regard the automation and autonomization of border surveillance technologies as more reliable than human controls: to them, it seems clear that these technologies could compensate for human error. Others, on the contrary, express concern about this trend. They emphasize the possible abuses in terms of non-accountability and exclusion and the ethical issues that may result from using and generalizing such techniques of surveillance, tracking, interception or confinement. They point to the risk of endangering the rights and freedoms of the mobile populations or States concerned.
The mathematization of borders forms part of a representation common to both its supporters and its detractors, that of highly effective surveillance techniques and their implementing methods, which renders the States and organizations responsible for border surveillance omnipotent, omniscient et omnipresent. It looks very much as though the technical dimension was becoming independent of the social relations that make it up.
That approach is spurious. It is not possible to dissociate surveillance techniques, however successful and automated they may be, from the political, social and economic conditions in which they are first designed then put into effect. Deployed and associated with systems of pre-existing checks and with specific institutional and political stakeholders, they reproduce the contradictions and lack of foresight of the organizations and stakeholders that deploy them. Moreover, in transforming and modifying the organizational environment in which they are deployed and modifying the reality they are intended to check, they create new challenges that those who promote them cannot foresee. Lastly, like any surveillance system, they are often reappropriated and misappropriated not only by the actors who implement them but also by those seeking to elude border surveillance.
This conference therefore has a dual objective: to examine the political and ethical issues related to this technologization of borders, its implementation as well as its misuses, and to show the resulting discrepancy between the representation it produces and the practical reality, in order to understand that to speak of malfunction, or not, is in itself politically significant.