From intimate technologies to livestreaming enforcement: The intimate geopolitics of digital border enforcement

Deterrence messaging has become an important border enforcement strategy, and digital dissemination of messaging campaigns has become commonplace. In Australia, the use of digital deterrence messaging campaigns in the 2010s brought enforcement into everyday, intimate spaces. Using an approach drawing on intimacy and geopolitics and informed by scholarship on digital geographies, this paper argues that the devices where people access social media, particularly mobile phones, have become intimate technologies that transform how people experience bordering practices. Encounters with Australian deterrence messaging in the 2010s show how encounters with border enforcement through intimate technologies introduce new spatial and temporal experiences of the border, impacting belonging and connection.