The Digitalisation of Border Controls and their Corporate Actors

Didier Bigo (1)

1 CERI - Centre de recherches internationales (Sciences Po, CNRS)

The dematerialisation of physical borders via the digitisation of the process of control has changed the ways we understand international frontiers. Surveillance of the borders are now exercised at a distance, before individuals arrive. Even if most border guards insist that they have the ultimate (sovereign) right to decide who enters, the development of pre-check-in databases have de facto displaced the modalities of authentification and identification of travellers. This article depicts these changes, and shows how control is ‘distributed’ along the journeys of the passengers, and between many different actors, who are not all, by any means, public agents. The role of corporate actors are crucial.

Keywords: surveillance; Schengen Information System (SIS); eu-LISA; Frontex; private providers; transnational guilds; intelligencification of control.; smart borders

Domains: Political science

Didier Bigo. The Digitalisation of Border Controls and their Corporate Actors. Mary Bosworth and Lucia Zedner (Eds). Privatising Border Control. Law at the Limits of the Sovereign State, Oxford University Press, 2022, 9780192857163. ⟨hal-03967365⟩