Digital mobilities and smart borders
how digital technologies transform migration and sovereign borders
- ISBN: 9783110713978
- Editorial: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
- Fecha de la edición: 2024
- Lugar de la edición: Berlin. Alemania
- Colección: De Gruyter Contemporary Social Sciences
- Encuadernación: Cartoné
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 265
- Idiomas: Inglés
The integration of digital technologies into daily life is making social and political relations reliant on digitally stored and transmitted data. Digital Mobilities studies the impacts of 'digitisation' on state borders and global migration. It demonstrates how digitisation at the border, including the digital enhancement of migration and growth of smart borders, is changing the dynamics of international travel and altering the very nature of state territory.
Digitisation is one of the most powerful and pervasive motivators of social change in the 21st century. It involves digital technologies being incorporated into the activities and interactions of daily life. Digitisation is promoted by governments seeking to increase the controllability of populations, businesses hoping to enhance the efficiency of production and exchange, and individuals looking to extend their social networks and digitally augment their daily activities. Digital Mobilities contributes to the growing body of work examining digitisation and social change by studying the impacts of digitisation on state territories, borders and global travel. From e-gates, drone patrols and biometric databases to smartphone-equipped asylum seeking and pre-checked-in business travel, there is no aspect of contemporary bordering and movement that is not being digitised. The resulting socio-technical features of borders and migration are impacting the way people move around the world, as well as the means states use to control, monitor and facilitate that movement.
Introduction: Sovereignty and mobilities in a digitised world 1
Talking to computers at the border 1
Digitisation 3
State sovereignty and borders 7
What makes state borders smart? 13
Digital border technologies 16
The digitisation of cross-border mobilities 23
Studying digitisation at the border and on the move 26
The spatial and temporal organisation of digitised borders 30
Digitisation and the position of state borders 30
Identifying where borders exist 31
The spatial logic of digitised borders 33
Defining the contours of digitised borders: Global spreads and fuzzy
edges 38
The invisibility of digital borders 43
The mobilities of digitised sovereign borders 45
The digital (dis)articulation of sovereign borders 48
The changing temporal nature of digitised borders 51
The spatial and temporal logics of digitised borders 54
Digital identities, algorithms and exclusion 57
How digitised borders assess people 57
Data doubles 58
Comparative digital identities of the border 64
Enrolment exclusion: Digitised borders not seeing minority subjects 67
The algorithmic exclusion of non-normative subjects 71
The digitisation of the political community 76
Wasted lives and internal smart borders 79
The role of digital identities at the border 84
Modern bordering agency 87
Looking beyond single border agents 87
Bordering agency and actor-networks 89
The digitisation of border assemblages: The internal agency of digital
borders 93
Increased complexity of bordering networks 96
Increased opacity of bordering agencies 99
The displacement of human border guards 102
The changing roles of human border actants 108
Implications of digitised bordering agency 112
The digitisation of travel 115
The digital technologies of travel 115
Digital technologies as essential tools of travel 117
Travel risks and threats posed by personal digital technologies 121
The digitisation of travel assemblages and agency 124
Novel digitised travel experiences 130
The creation of mobile digital divides 135
The production of digitised travellers 139
Travellers vs borders 141
Tensions and conflict at the border 141
Bordering strategies and travel tactics 142
The strategic shifting of bordering labour: The rise of the border
prosumer 148
Surveillance and countersurveillance 155
The embodiment of borders 159
Kinetic elites vs low motility travellers 164
Conclusion: Reimagining border digitisation 168
Shaping the digitisation of borders and travel 168
The trends of border and migration digitisation 169
The inevitability and malleability of border digitisation 175
The transparency of digitised borders 180
Challenging discourses of objectivity within the digitised border 191
‘We’ are part of the border 197
References 200
Index
