European border policing: EUROSUR, knowledge, calculation

Global Crime. 2017 [Link]

Abstract

The article asks how we can make sense of the central role attributed to technology in border policing today and relates discussions of ‘techno-’ or ‘technology-driven’ (border) policing to the issue of knowledge. It examines EUROSUR, a set of measures for placing the external borders of the European Union under, ‘real-time’ surveillance. It argues that current understandings of knowledge in the border policing literature require conceptual specification to make otherwise unnoticed aspects of border policing amenable to empirical inquiry. To this end, the article foregrounds the notion of centres of calculation as a way to refine inquiries into policing as ‘knowledge work’. It examines knowledge arrangements related to European border policing, showing how the understanding that border policing is concerned with and operates through flows is contingently and progressively built through processes of stabilisation, mobilisation and extension of social and material networks of actors, institutions and devices.