Full Description
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.
Contents
FOREWORD: Borders & Bits: From Obvious to Insidious Violence by Ruha Benjamin
Introduction: Resisting Technologies of Violence and Control By Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer
SECTION 1: Ideologies of Exclusion:
Title? By Harsha Walia
Multiplying State Violence in the Name of Homeland Security by Mizue Aizeki
Empire's Walls, Global Apartheid's Infrastructure by Joseph Nevins and Todd Miller
Fortress Europe's Proliferating Borders by Miriam Ticktin
Frontex and Fortress Europe's Technological Experiments by Katy Fallon and Petra Molnar
Abolish Migration Deterrence by Jenna M. Loyd
Cruel Fictions in the Black Mediterranean by Ida Danewid, The Black Mediterranean Collective
CASE STUDY: Why We Need Local Campaigns to End Immigration Detention
CASE STUDY: Why We Took the U.K. to Court for their Discriminatory Visa Streaming Algorithm
SECTION 2: Conjuring the Perfect Threat: Techno-Securitization and Domestic Policing
Building the #NoTechforICE Campaign: An Interview with Jacinta Gonzalez
Big Tech, Borders and Biosecurity: Securitization in Britain after Covid-19 by Nisha Kapoor
Targeting Muslim communities in NYC: Interview with Fahd Ahmed
Global Palestine: Exporting Israel's Regime of Population Control by Jeff Halper
Chicago's Gang Database Targeting People of Color: Interview with Xanat Sobrevilla and Alyx Goodwin
Building Community Power in Unequal Cities: Interview with Hamid Khan
CASE STUDY: Why We Are Suing Clearview AI In California State Court
CASE STUDY: How We Fight Against (Tech-Facilitated) Persecution of Uyghurs in China and Abroad
CASE STUDY: Stop Urban Shield: How We Fought DHS' Militarized Police Trainings
SECTION 3: Digital IDs: The Body as a Border
Digital ID: A Primer by Sara Baker, The Engine Room
IDs and the Citizen: Technologically Determined Identity in India by Usha Ramanathan
The cost of recognition by the state: IDs card as coercion: Interview with Rodjé Malcolm and Matthew McNaughton
The UK's Production of Tech-enabled Precarity: An Interview with Gracie Mae Bradley
On Donkeys and Blockchains: A Conversation with Margie Cheesman
CASE STUDY: How We Mobilized Civil Society to Fight Tunisia's Proposed Digital ID System
CASE STUDY: Why We Must Fight for Alternatives to the UK's Digital-Only ID System
SECTION 4: Bordering Everyday Cities
Apartheid Tech: The Use and Expansion of Biometric Identification and Surveillance Technologies in the Occupied West Bank by Marwa Fartafta
The Encroachment of Smart Cities by Ben Green
CONTROL-X: Communication, Control, & Exclusion by Brian Jefferson
Data Justice in Mexico: How Big Data is Reshaping the Struggle for Rights and Political Freedoms by Arely Cruz-Santiago, Ernesto Schwartz-Marín, and Conor O'Reilly
Corporate Tech and The Legible City by Ryan Gerety, Mariah Montgomery, Mizue Aizeki and Nasma Ahmed
Seeing the Watched: Mass Surveillance in Detroit By Tawana Petty
Necropolitics and Neoliberalism Are Driving Brazil's Surveillance Infrastructure By Rafael Evangelista
CASE STUDY: Why We Must Fight Against COVID-19 Surveillance and Technosolutionism
CASE STUDY: How We Challenged the German Migration Office's Surveillance Technology
CASE STUDY: Fighting San Diego's Smart Streetlights Super Surveillance System
SECTION 5: Looking Forward
Abolish National Security by Arun Kundnani
The First Step is Finding Each Other by Timmy Châu
The Red Deal: Indigenous Liberation and The Fight to Save the Planet by Nick Estes
Trying Harder to Build a World Where Life is Precious: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Editors and Contributors
Acknowledgments
