Borders and Surveillance

Summary

This encyclopedia entry elaborates on a set of questions: How do societies build, govern, and maintain borders and surveillance? How do borders and surveillance govern societies? And how do data transform the imaginaries and infrastructures of bordering and surveilling? The article engages with a heterogeneous and plural research field at the intersection of science and technology studies, critical border studies, and surveillance studies. It proposes to understand borders and surveillance as complex and contingent sociotechnical arrangements that have undergone fundamental transformations over time. They provide governmental tools and mechanisms for circulating and sorting populations, and they appear as the conditions and limits of governing at the same time. Borders and surveillance are shaped not only by digital technologies and the mass extraction and collection of data from people, but also by societies’ imaginative, cultural, and economic resources to invest in and maintain them. Borders and surveillance have never maintained the same appearance and functions throughout history. A diverse scholarship over the past two decades has explored how some of their most evident transformations and frictions relate to how they operate and are experienced through data. Borders and surveillance have become transformed into diffuse and deeply embedded systems, characterized by (a) their dispersal across multiple actors and institutions, (b) the rise of automation in shaping decisions and governance, (c) the embedding of surveillance into routine life via infrastructures of in/visibility, and (d) their entrenchment in securitization politics that frame (mobile) populations as risk.

Datafication has often been driven by powerful imaginaries; four of which will be highlighted as shaping contemporary border and surveillance regimes: technosolutionism, which frames mobilities and security problems as solvable through data; transparency, which demands visibility from individuals while obscuring the systems that surveil them; automation, which embeds algorithmic control and decision-making into infrastructures; and interoperability, which imagines seamless data integration across systems to enhance control, often reinforcing technopolitical power and market logics. Such imaginaries perform and stabilize future social threats, security imperatives, or political promises. At the same time, these imagined futures of bordering and surveilling are entangled with infrastructural practices and investments. These in turn highlight how borders and surveillance depend on often invisible labor and remain fragile and contested configurations, which always reflect political and social struggles. In conclusion, this entry calls for future research to acknowledge the concrete, embodied realities behind the abstract representations of data, and critically engage with such imaginaries. Future research can offer pathways for resistance and imagining more equitable alternatives to the oppressive character of contemporary border and surveillance regimes.