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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.

In early 2021, the European Parliament established the Frontex Scrutiny Working Group (FSWG) to monitor all aspects of the functioning of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). The FSWG organized a series of public hearings and carried out a 'fact-finding' investigation to gather information and evidence about pushbacks of refugees in the Aegean Sea. By unpacking some of the controversies that emerged during the hearings of the FSWG, I explore how secrecy was practised and strategically employed to obscure the responsibility of Frontex for the reported pushbacks, and how it was contested through the presentation of related evidence. I explain how secrecy and related controversies and struggles over making pushbacks public involve a variety of actors that enrol and interact with a heterogeneous set of objects, including digital, visual and archival traces of violence at sea, as well as databases used to record information about maritime incidents. I argue that secrecy regarding pushbacks is not just about keeping information about people and objects involved in security operations hidden. Secrecy is also produced through the selective recording, (mis)categorization and circulation of information in the name of transparency.

This article explores the maintenance of large-scale information systems that are used for, among other purposes, border security in the European Union. My argument is that information systems do not always operate according to their design scripts. They materialize as unruly, unstable and failing infrastructures that are governed through maintenance in order to correct any identified functional anomalies and address potential future failures by adapting them to emerging technologies and the service needs of end-users (e.g. border guards, police). To conceptualize the maintenance labour through which information systems are governed, I synthesize ideas developed in Michel Foucault's work on biopolitics and governmentality with contributions that explore the agentic forces and proclivities of technoscientific matter. By unearthing the very mechanics of maintenance processes, I make two contributions to the literature that interrogates the digitization and smartening of border security. First, I demonstrate that attending to maintenance permits a more complete understanding of the agency of information systems. Second, I broaden the research agenda that explores border security as practice by directing attention towards the often invisible, but politically significant, labour of maintainers who, by rendering information systems functional, sustain the power to govern international mobility by digital means.

In this paper, we critically interrogate the registration of migrants in pan-European, large-scale biometric databases, like Eurodac (European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database). We employ the notion of "epidermal politics", which analytically captures how human bodies – and skin in particular – become sites of identification, violent control, and contestation. Thinking through epidermal politics allows us to understand how the development of technologies that render skin visible and analysable, such as fingerprint scanners and biometric matching algorithms, are entangled in relations of power, structural racism, and subjugation. Drawing on the work of Simone Browne (2015) and her elaboration of Franz Fanon's theory of epidermisation, we argue that migration control in Europe, and its violent and racialising effects, are embedded within data infrastructures that "stigmatise" (Van Der Ploeg 1999) post-colonial "others" with codes to control their mobilities. We unpack this argument in three stages. First, we discuss the governmental rationales that inform the use of Eurodac for the management of migration and asylum in Europe. Second, we discuss how biometric control is related to different forms of state violence, including deportation, prolonged detention, and physical violence associated with the forced registration of migrants' fingerprints. Third, we attend to strategies employed by migrants to contest biometric control, focusing specifically on fingertip burning and mutilation, which we interpret as acts of dissent and self-determination to escape control. Overall, our goal is to emphasise the need to pay closer attention to dynamics of violence and racialisation that emerge at biometric and other kinds of "hi-tech" borders.

AbstractThis article focuses on the control of international mobility through the gathering, processing, and sharing of air travellers' data. While a lot has been written about pre-emptive rationalities of security translated into the functionalities of IT systems used for border controls, we take a step further and investigate how these rationalities are operationalised through data transfer, screening, validation, discarding, profiling, contextualisation, calibration, and adjustment practices. These practices may seem banal and technical; however, we demonstrate how they matter politically as they underpin the making of international security. We do so by analysing the work of Passenger Information Units (PIUs) and retracing how they turn Passenger Name Record (PNR) data into actionable intelligence for counterterrorism and the fight against serious crime. To better understand the work of PIUs, we introduce and unpack the concept of 'epistemic fusion'. This explicates how security intelligence comes into being through practices that pertain to cross-domain data frictions, the contextualisation of data-driven knowledge through its synthesis with more traditional forms of investigatory knowledge and expertise, and the adjustment of the intelligence produced to make it actionable on the ground.

This article speaks to debates in international political sociology that critically interrogate the ongoing digitization of border controls through the deployment of surveillance technologies that render mobility intelligible and governable. Our contribution to these debates is both empirical and conceptual. Empirically, we explore not only how surveillance is enacted but also how it is contested and fails to meet its stated objectives. We do so by focusing on two technologies that support the visibilization of maritime borderzones and mobilities: satellites and drones. Conceptually, our contribution revolves around the kinopolitical character of maritime surveillance and the productive power of technologically mediated vision. We synthesize Nail's work on kinopolitics with ideas inspired by Foucauldian studies on governmentality to develop the following argument: satellites and drones are technologies of power embedded within a kinopolitical regime of maritime surveillance, which strategizes vision in attempts to govern subjects and objects on the move—attempts that challenge any clear-cut distinction between security controls and humanitarian interventions in the field of border management.