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Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence
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.
Nasma Ahmed, Khalid Alexander, Sara Baker, Lea Beckmann, Wafa Ben-Hassine, Ruha Benjamin, Maike Bohn, 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
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.
Nasma Ahmed, Khalid Alexander, Sara Baker, Lea Beckmann, Wafa Ben-Hassine, Ruha Benjamin, Maike Bohn, 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
- GenresNonfictionTechnology
354 pages, Paperback
Published February 13, 2024
18 people are currently reading
394 people want to read
About the author
Ruha Benjamin
11 books551 followersRuha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science and medicine, race and technology, knowledge and power. Ruha is author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford 2013), Race After Technology (Polity 2019), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
Ruha Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.
Ruha Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 30, 2024
A must read if you've read The Shock Doctrine and want to dig deeper in more insidious aspects of technologies of violence into our daily lives or if you have a sinking inkling that what's been going on in Palestine is only the start or just if you care about freedom of movement.
March 31, 2024
The total surveillance of society in the interest of public safety and the efficient provision of public services seems to be the unstated goal of modern-day governments. They strive to make use of all that digitalisation and AI might have to offer in the future in knowing everything about the people who live within their borders, generating a final say as to who deserves to get whatever might be on offer.
The essays in this book set out what the ideal of the panoptic society has come to mean at the present stage of its development, marking out who are showing up persistently as losers as the relentless unblinking eye of surveillance maintains its gaze.
Concern about the direction the new technologies are taking us extends beyond the political fringe. A UN report published in 2020 notes that these have “historical precedents in colonial technologies of racialised governance.” It is unsurprising then to find that they currently have most traction in immigration and border policing, which, as the authors of many of the chapters in the book argue, function as a continuation of the white supremacist world.
Divided into five sections, the book opens with essays on the theme of ‘ideologies of exclusion”. The desire to maintain the borders between countries as “asymmetric relations of wealth accrued from colonial impoverishment and racial capitalism” has produced grandiose schemes aimed at the digitalisation of fingerprint and facial recognition data stored in gigantic databases such as the EU’s EURODAC and the US’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, the later billed by the Biden administration as a more human version of Trump’s grotesque border wall.
In an early chapter, Mizue Aizeki, explains how this technology extends the reach of the state across communities already closely surveilled in order to inflict punishments that go well beyond anything inflicted on ‘regular’ citizens. The deportation of non-citizen residents of the US for criminal convictions, often many decades after their occurrence, provides a stark example of the risks which migrant communities have to live with in that country.
Miriam Ticktin and Petra Molnar, contributing separate chapters on ‘Fortress Europe’ policies, explain how the logic of knowing everything about people who might one day become migrants to territories north of the Mediterranean, requires data about populations that go deeper and deeper into the African continent. This becomes available to the notorious FRONTEX policing agency to enable it to enforce restrictions on movement across borders on the Mediterranean sea and at the land borders of the EU on the Greece-Turkiye border and the Moroccan coast.
A second section sets out the theme of techno-securitisation and domestic policing. What comes across here is the role that the giant tech corporations are playing in driving forward an agenda that aims at total surveillance. Once again, the US provides examples of how this is happening at rapid pace. Data brokering companies which typically manifest as legal research entities or publishers are “creating entire systems of a data economy that is exposing people’s most private information to police authorities. Amazon Web Services is the primary cloud service provider for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, and another tech corporation, Palantir, which specialises in developing data fusion platforms which draw down information from multiple databases, is also deeply in cahoots with immigration enforcement.
Writing about the store of personal data held by the UK’s National Health Service, Nisha Kapoor writes about the government’s wish to bring this into the purview of its immigration control system. Palantir again crops up in its role as providing multi-million pound contract services to the departments of both health and defence, with the potential that the amorphous concept of ‘national security’, can trail across each as well other databases to point fingers at individuals who either are, or in danger of becoming involved, in radical political activities.
Part 3, dealing with the ’body as a border, scrutinises digital ID systems which make use of allegedly unique physical identifiers, from fingerprint through to iris and facial recognition, to fix the individual to a record held on a database. With experiences report in, again, the US and the Europe, this section also draws on experiences in India, Jamaica and Tunisia. In the first of these cases, digitisation of ID has aided and abetted the plans of the government of Narendra Modi to set Hinduism as a default feature of Indian nationality. When the attempt to create a national register of citizens was first trialled in the eastern state of Assam it led to 1.9 million people being declared stateless and illegal . The ambition to ‘Know Your Citizen’ has led to technology controllers producing an ID that would serve markets, breaking the population down into silos with digital footprints which would determine access to such things as credit and other services.
The fourth section considers the implications of surveillance technologies for the bordering of ‘everyday cities’. Israel features here as a country making extensive use of technology to maintain surveillance over 4.5 million Palestinians. Arrays of CCTV cameras and military checkpoints funnel the subject population into narrow channels where they can either be permitted or denied opportunities to move onwards. But it is in North America where so-called smart cities seem to be making most rapid progress. The Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs worked in partnership with the city of Toronto to embed sensors into such everyday objects as lampposts which would read the digital information held in the credit cards and other biometric documents on the persons of people as they walked around them. Machine learning was expected to make use of this data to “predict events before they occur and optimise municipal services.” The totalising vision of a society so ruthless exposed to surveillance provoked a reaction from Torontonians which led to Sidewalk Labs abandoning the project, with similar success in halting moves in the same direction being achieved in Los Angeles.
The final section looks forward to the strategic options which might facilitate further resistance. At this point the politics of the book rushes into the abolitionist stance which is becoming the vogue in radical circles. Arun Kundnani urges that the fight back express itself as the ambition to “abolish national security”. More modestly, Timmy Chua urges that we work to “find each other” as a first step in mounting resistance. Realisation of what Big Tech and the state have in store for us all means that we are furnished with many targets, from weapons manufacture warehouses, police fusion centres, campus military recruitment, around which campaigns can be organised.
The book finishes with a lengthy interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, one of the main thinkers about modern abolitionist politics. She mixes practical, concrete examples of what fightbacks against surveillance are looking like and the people who are being drawn into them. But for this reader the sense is that much remains to be done to move the centre of resistance away from the tech-savvy campaigns which are doing so much to de-mystify the Orwellian horror which seems to be taking root all around us into a response which builds on the experience of regular, working class people. Abolitionism as an idea resonates in a country which achieved one great historical abolition – that of slavery – but can often seems like a proclamation of utopia when what is needed is determined reform. What will be needed in the first instance to shackle the surveillance state, which will then go on towards its complete abolition?
The essays in this book set out what the ideal of the panoptic society has come to mean at the present stage of its development, marking out who are showing up persistently as losers as the relentless unblinking eye of surveillance maintains its gaze.
Concern about the direction the new technologies are taking us extends beyond the political fringe. A UN report published in 2020 notes that these have “historical precedents in colonial technologies of racialised governance.” It is unsurprising then to find that they currently have most traction in immigration and border policing, which, as the authors of many of the chapters in the book argue, function as a continuation of the white supremacist world.
Divided into five sections, the book opens with essays on the theme of ‘ideologies of exclusion”. The desire to maintain the borders between countries as “asymmetric relations of wealth accrued from colonial impoverishment and racial capitalism” has produced grandiose schemes aimed at the digitalisation of fingerprint and facial recognition data stored in gigantic databases such as the EU’s EURODAC and the US’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, the later billed by the Biden administration as a more human version of Trump’s grotesque border wall.
In an early chapter, Mizue Aizeki, explains how this technology extends the reach of the state across communities already closely surveilled in order to inflict punishments that go well beyond anything inflicted on ‘regular’ citizens. The deportation of non-citizen residents of the US for criminal convictions, often many decades after their occurrence, provides a stark example of the risks which migrant communities have to live with in that country.
Miriam Ticktin and Petra Molnar, contributing separate chapters on ‘Fortress Europe’ policies, explain how the logic of knowing everything about people who might one day become migrants to territories north of the Mediterranean, requires data about populations that go deeper and deeper into the African continent. This becomes available to the notorious FRONTEX policing agency to enable it to enforce restrictions on movement across borders on the Mediterranean sea and at the land borders of the EU on the Greece-Turkiye border and the Moroccan coast.
A second section sets out the theme of techno-securitisation and domestic policing. What comes across here is the role that the giant tech corporations are playing in driving forward an agenda that aims at total surveillance. Once again, the US provides examples of how this is happening at rapid pace. Data brokering companies which typically manifest as legal research entities or publishers are “creating entire systems of a data economy that is exposing people’s most private information to police authorities. Amazon Web Services is the primary cloud service provider for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, and another tech corporation, Palantir, which specialises in developing data fusion platforms which draw down information from multiple databases, is also deeply in cahoots with immigration enforcement.
Writing about the store of personal data held by the UK’s National Health Service, Nisha Kapoor writes about the government’s wish to bring this into the purview of its immigration control system. Palantir again crops up in its role as providing multi-million pound contract services to the departments of both health and defence, with the potential that the amorphous concept of ‘national security’, can trail across each as well other databases to point fingers at individuals who either are, or in danger of becoming involved, in radical political activities.
Part 3, dealing with the ’body as a border, scrutinises digital ID systems which make use of allegedly unique physical identifiers, from fingerprint through to iris and facial recognition, to fix the individual to a record held on a database. With experiences report in, again, the US and the Europe, this section also draws on experiences in India, Jamaica and Tunisia. In the first of these cases, digitisation of ID has aided and abetted the plans of the government of Narendra Modi to set Hinduism as a default feature of Indian nationality. When the attempt to create a national register of citizens was first trialled in the eastern state of Assam it led to 1.9 million people being declared stateless and illegal . The ambition to ‘Know Your Citizen’ has led to technology controllers producing an ID that would serve markets, breaking the population down into silos with digital footprints which would determine access to such things as credit and other services.
The fourth section considers the implications of surveillance technologies for the bordering of ‘everyday cities’. Israel features here as a country making extensive use of technology to maintain surveillance over 4.5 million Palestinians. Arrays of CCTV cameras and military checkpoints funnel the subject population into narrow channels where they can either be permitted or denied opportunities to move onwards. But it is in North America where so-called smart cities seem to be making most rapid progress. The Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs worked in partnership with the city of Toronto to embed sensors into such everyday objects as lampposts which would read the digital information held in the credit cards and other biometric documents on the persons of people as they walked around them. Machine learning was expected to make use of this data to “predict events before they occur and optimise municipal services.” The totalising vision of a society so ruthless exposed to surveillance provoked a reaction from Torontonians which led to Sidewalk Labs abandoning the project, with similar success in halting moves in the same direction being achieved in Los Angeles.
The final section looks forward to the strategic options which might facilitate further resistance. At this point the politics of the book rushes into the abolitionist stance which is becoming the vogue in radical circles. Arun Kundnani urges that the fight back express itself as the ambition to “abolish national security”. More modestly, Timmy Chua urges that we work to “find each other” as a first step in mounting resistance. Realisation of what Big Tech and the state have in store for us all means that we are furnished with many targets, from weapons manufacture warehouses, police fusion centres, campus military recruitment, around which campaigns can be organised.
The book finishes with a lengthy interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, one of the main thinkers about modern abolitionist politics. She mixes practical, concrete examples of what fightbacks against surveillance are looking like and the people who are being drawn into them. But for this reader the sense is that much remains to be done to move the centre of resistance away from the tech-savvy campaigns which are doing so much to de-mystify the Orwellian horror which seems to be taking root all around us into a response which builds on the experience of regular, working class people. Abolitionism as an idea resonates in a country which achieved one great historical abolition – that of slavery – but can often seems like a proclamation of utopia when what is needed is determined reform. What will be needed in the first instance to shackle the surveillance state, which will then go on towards its complete abolition?
March 8, 2025
incredible survey of global systems of surveillance and those in resistance/defiance. naturally a strong scholar-activist tone (duh, the frontier is often speculative!), but lays out some clear tactics and strategies for those in the struggle. heavily recommend pairing with border & rule by harsha walia.
June 29, 2024
Eye-opening essay collections and case-studies around the world that left me to question individual and state-based technology in terms of:
- who does it benefit? Who does it discriminate?
-who is negatively impacted?
- what can be done? How can we resist, what methods were used previously?
- what data can is gathered, kept?
- who else has access to the data? Do i have control over other's access?
Must read, think about, resist techbologies of survellience that's creating other forms of borders.
- who does it benefit? Who does it discriminate?
-who is negatively impacted?
- what can be done? How can we resist, what methods were used previously?
- what data can is gathered, kept?
- who else has access to the data? Do i have control over other's access?
Must read, think about, resist techbologies of survellience that's creating other forms of borders.
July 31, 2024
pretty eye opening but, like many academic work, i'm always hoping for more pragmatism. it's a lot of this is bad (period). i read it a few months ago and main bits i remember...
- how israel is the main technological powerhouse of surveilance/border control/etc.
- how blockchain deep down tends to cause societal inequality
- that governments are putting A LOT of money into border technologies and that a lot of these technologies are causing quite a bit of damage
i do work in technology and couldn't help thinking that the failures of the technologies are likely not as straightforward as they seem. it is very hard to predict the dangers your work can lead to and it is easy to focus on the damage.
all in all, some of the bits were quite good, some quite ok
- how israel is the main technological powerhouse of surveilance/border control/etc.
- how blockchain deep down tends to cause societal inequality
- that governments are putting A LOT of money into border technologies and that a lot of these technologies are causing quite a bit of damage
i do work in technology and couldn't help thinking that the failures of the technologies are likely not as straightforward as they seem. it is very hard to predict the dangers your work can lead to and it is easy to focus on the damage.
all in all, some of the bits were quite good, some quite ok
August 29, 2024
3.75 stars
January 3, 2025
This was AWESOME. Led to a very good convo with my mother and my sister.
October 3, 2025
通过分析不同国家实施科技监管和暴力的例子，以及一系列国家边界管理事件，揭露以控制为核心的的科技发展如何加剧全球种族隔离。每一个章节也通过介绍不同非盈利团结组织如何对抗专制权力的实际案例，帮助读者去理解个人以及组织如何在行动上做出抵抗。精读了最后一章节，了解废除主义在不同的交叉性中如何抵抗国家监管。
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews