Engineering Digitised Borders

This book focuses on the Visa Information System (VIS): a large-scale data infrastructure interconnecting a multiplicity of state authorities that enact border security and migration management in the European Union. The VIS is embedded within a setting of pan-European IT systems that filter international mobility, identify threatening elements, hamper the travels of poor, racialized, and alienated subjects, while at the same time facilitate the circulation of those expected to generate financial and other kinds of capital. The book examines the engineering of the VIS by analyzing how it was designed before its deployment in the field of border security, and how it is maintained to ensure continuous and secure operation. It illustrates how engineering processes that render the VIS functional are not just technoscientific, but inherently political, as they (re)configure and maintain the power to govern international mobility by digital means.

Enriches understandings of the digitisation of border security Challenges conventional understandings of IT systems as mere security instruments or tools by providing an empirically grounded diagnosis of their ontology and agency Contributes theoretically and conceptually to an understanding of technoscience not as an independent or externalized variable in international politics and practices, but as something that deeply entangled with a multitude of other elements on many levels Draws on the intersections of STS and IR and thus contributes to an area that has in recent years been vibrant and innovative both in terms of methodology and in terms of how to draw political and normative conclusions from the study of complex sociotechnical systems

Autorentext

Georgios Glouftsios is Postdoctoral Researcher and Contract Professor at the University of Trento, School of International Studies. His work sits at the intersection of Critical Security Studies, International Political Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies. His current research focuses on technologies used for border security, law enforcement and migration management in the European Union.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part 1: Design.- Chapter 2: Heterogeneity, Practice-Networks, Agency.- Chapter 3: Free Movement, the Interface, and Heterogeneous Engineers.- Chapter 4: Designing the VIS.- Part 2: Operational Management.- Chapter 5: Governing the System Multiple.- Chapter 6: The Birth of eu-LISA.- Chapter 7: Operating the VIS.- Epilogue.