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Return to the Current Issue Index
Contemporary security policies are characterized by a dramatic focus on high technology like biometrics as a security enabler. The process of the technologization of security, i.e. the making of technology the centerpiece of security systems and its perception as an absolute security provider, started in the US in the Eighties and has since been expanded to the European Union (EU) and to almost all developed countries. In this process, biometrics is accepted as the ultimate technology to identify people with certainty. This article examines this emphasis on biometrics in France and in the US in the context of the transformations of late modernity and analyses the philosophical and ethical issues that the emphasis on the body as the core element of identification systems raises.
Dean Wilson and Leanne Weber - Surveillance, Risk and Preemption on the Australian Border
In this paper we will map and analyze Australian border surveillance technologies. In doing so, we wish to interrogate the extent to which these surveillance practices are constitutive of new regimes of regulation and control. Surveillance technologies, we argue, are integral to strategies of risk profiling, social sorting and “punitive pre-emption.” The Australian nation-state thus mirrors broader global patterns in the government of mobility, whereby mobile bodies are increasingly sorted into kinetic elites and kinetic underclasses. Surveillance technologies and practices positioned within a frame of security and control diminish the spaces that human rights and social justice might occupy. It is therefore imperative that critical scholars examine the moral implications of risk and identify ways in which spaces for such significant concerns might be forged.
Taking its cue from Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s notion of apparatus (dispositif), this article explores the assemblage of mechanisms, institutions, discourses and practices that came to be conceptualized as a “smart border.” Through an examination of Canadian policy documents, this article analyses the smart border as a “diffuse border.” Physically extending beyond and inside its geopolitical location through a set of legal, administrative and technological procedures such as refugee containment, counter-terrorism measures and information-sharing, the border thus articulates fluid control measures based on the use of information technologies to more restrictive procedures such as confinement. As a lack of transparency and racialized assessments of dangerousness often characterize its operations, the smart border apparatus calls for an analysis of the ways in which it contributes to the building of an “intelligence paradigm” through which the securitization of the region is undertaken.
Willem de Lint -The Security Double Take: The Political, Simulation and the Border
This paper conceptualizes the ‘security double take’ as an expression of the adaptation of longstanding parameters of security to reflexive ordering expectations. I proceed by examining legacy concepts of the modern liberal nation state and by interrogating the rupture between current and previous expectations of the sovereign spectacle. Although launched originally from the realist security discourse of political theory, the diminished priority of ‘the real’ in current political conditions reframes security as the sum of reviewable production values. The border is a site par excellence for the staging of security performances.
