BOOK TALK: Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence

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 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.

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Fahd Ahmed is Executive Direct of DRUM - Desis Rising Up & Moving. Fahd co-led the work with Muslim, Arab, and South Asian immigrant detainees before, and immediately after 9/11, by coordinating the detainee visitation program and later ran the End Racial Profiling Campaign.

Mizue Aizeki is Executive Director and founder of the Surveillance Resistance Lab. 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.

Arun Kundnani is a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism. The Guardian has described him as “one of Britain’s best political writers.” Kundnani is the author of What is Antiracism?, The Muslims are Coming!, and The End of Tolerance.

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She publishes widely on topics such as immigration, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities. Most notably, she is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care.