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The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This pathbreaking volume exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence.
In the name of “smart” borders, the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorize and control human beings and their movement.
These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in
Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence shed light on this new threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it.
The organizers, journalists, and scholars in these pages are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.
List of contents
About the author
Mizue Aizeki is the Director of Surveillance,Technology, and Immigration Policing at the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP). Aizeki's photographic work appears in
Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid and
Policing the Planet.
Matt Mahmoudi is Researcher/Adviser on Artificial Intelligence & Human Rights at Amnesty Tech, where he has spent the last two years leading the effort to ban facial recognition technologies. He is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. Mahmoudi is co-author of the book
Digital Witness, published by Oxford University Press.
Coline Schupfer is a consultant working with the International Institute for Environment and Development and Open Society Foundations on community-based public interest litigation. She has written for publications including the
International Justice Monitor,
Border Criminologies,
Opinio Juris, and the
Asia Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law.
Ruha Benjamin is an internationally recognized writer, speaker, and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She is the award-winning author of
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and editor of
Captivating Technology, among many other publications. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including the
New York Times, the
Washington Post, CNN,
The Root, and
The Guardian.
Summary
The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This pathbreaking volume exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence.
In the name of “smart” borders, the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorize and control human beings and their movement.
These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence shed light on this threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it.
The organizers, journalists, and scholars in these pages are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.
Contributors: Nasma Ahmed, Khalid Alexander, Sara Baker, Lea Beckmann, Wafa Ben-Hassine, Ruha Benjamin, Maike Bohn, Gracie Mae Bradley, Margaret Cheesman, J. Carlos Lara Gálvez, Timmy Châu, Arely Cruz-Santiago, Ida Danewid, Nick Estes, Rafael Evangelista, Katy Fallon, Marwa Fatafta, Ryan Gerety, Ben Green, Jeff Helper, Nisha Kapoor, Lilly Irani, Brian Jordan Jefferson, Lara Kiswani, Arun Kundnani, Jenna M. Loyd, Rodjé Malcolm, Matthew McNaughton, Todd Miller, Petra Molnar, Mariah Montgomery, Joseph Nevins, Conor O’Reilly, Chai Patel, Tawana Petty, Ernesto Schwartz-Marin, Paromita Shah, Silky Shah, Koen Stoop, Miriam Ticktin, Harsha Walia
Foreword
- National media campaign, including TV, radio, and podcast interviews
- National print and online campaign, including reviews, features, author interviews
- Author readings and events
- Extensive social media campaign, including wide influencer galley mailing
- National consumer advertising campaign at publication
- Extensive library and school marketing
- Bookstore campaign, including signed copies, readings, and display materials
