SoLiXG:Bordering

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Bordering

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Bordering emphasizes the production and re-production of borders. Although semantically concerned with territoriality, which draws the line of an exclusive space, not seldom the sovereign nation-states’ territory, theoretical conceptualisations of borders tend to focus on technologies of inclusion and exclusion, and of state and corporate violence and discrimination. As Mbembe argues, borders are mere lines separating distinct sovereign entities but rather a term we should deploy for today’s organised violence that underpins ‘both contemporary capitalism and our world order in generally.’ Because borders are performative, polysemic and heterogeneous, we can study them as practices.

Border practices or bordering find new modes of operation when challenged and threatened to become porous. In many theoretical accounts in migration studies, borders and bordering are allocated to several levels of state power in cooperation with private actors hampering and endangering people’s movement. The porosity of the border has given rise to a logistification of the border regimes where people are ascribed illegality or/and incorporated into labour exploitation regimes. Bordering aim less, according to this purview, to stop people than to manage the timing and rhythms of people’s mobility to fit state-capital interests. Although bordering suggests flexible and mobile borders, geographies of border territories remain important, for instance, the carceral spaces of detention centres on islands and border policing in oceans. Yet, border geographies are also performative in a temporal sense: waiting often structures the lives of migrants and causes them to experience a ‘stuckedness’.

As movements of things and people become increasingly intricate, bordering methods tend to dialectically re-invent themselves. Today, the digital – as in the digitalisation of society and the digitisation of information, registers, census, maps, and Big Data etc. – creates an additional and supplementary geography, space, and embodiment for bordering. For instance, when considering the EU digital identity initiative to create interoperable systems for smoother mobility of EU citizens, we need to shift attention to how these practices produces the opposite for those excluded from the right to move freely.

In general, the accumulation of data through the constant growing devices connected to the digital sphere, carries risks of becoming weaponised. The interoperability of different sources of data give rise to new ideologies of predictability and detection of risk. The accumulative practice extracting data from everyone and everything to produce knowledge about certain population deemed as threats, makes us all complicit in the production of digital bordering. Hence, borders do not only cross the lives of migrants or refugees, but they separate, categorise, and discriminate all of us in invisible yet, by the global majority, violently felt ways. The gathering of data and the interoperability of data sets, produces discriminatory correlations, often reinforcing inequalities and overdetermining borders. The roots of these analytical correlations made thanks to Big Data, which are used to manipulate population behaviour, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues, can be found in statistical innovation by early 20th century biometric eugenicists. Thus, borders, bordering, and digital bordering, builds on previous forms and methods of violence and on colonial and racial regimes.

Avoiding a state centric understanding of borders, Gloria Anzaldúa, provides us with perspectives that bring the ambivalence and the hybridity of borderlands to the fore. People who become the border also have the potential to resist it. Although digitalisation and increasingly sophisticated techniques of surveillance and security serve to police the border, empirical studies illustrate contestations and autonomy of migrants as their lives cannot easily be represented by algorithmic logics.