Overflowing Borders

Abstract

A fundamental problem in international border policy has been to address the uncertainties of global flows through the social and technological construction of borders. This chapter seeks to address how it is that the private sector as well as other state and international actors and networks have sought to instil the notion that new information and communication technologies offer greater certainty in managing borders, and in turn the management of people and things across territory. As international flows of people, commodities, capital and information become increasingly framed by notions of risk and uncertainty, a recent move to address such problems has been to reconfigure the socio-technical constitution of borders by introducing new measures for identification, classification and risk assessment of flows. A salient example of this is the need for a technological renewal of the border to become, at its core, fundamentally “smart” in its capacity to manage uncertainty, by enhancing the infrastructure to easily target, identify, authenticate, assess and intervene in border management. This chapter seeks to address how uncertainty, as an epistemological condition in global market relations, is altering the socio-technical fabric of borders towards new smart regimes, and in turn to consider the emerging types of disciplinary techniques for mobility governance being advanced primarily, albeit not exclusively, by transnational private interests. For brevity, the analysis will be concerned exclusively with North America.