Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
In this article I have attributed the neglect of the technologisation of border controls and its effects on migrants’ room for manoeuvre by the existing CAM literature to a misreading of the securitisation of migration as a mere means for the disenfranchisement and economic exploitation of migrant labour. In order to overcome this economic reductionism, I have proposed to draw on Foucault’s notion of the security dispositif to conceptualise today’s border regimes. As Foucault perceives the security dispositif primarily as a dispositif of circulation, it brings out that security concerns and the promotion of freedom of movement are not in tension, but operate in tandem. It is the interplay between the two that drives the adoption of a pro-active risk management approach that in turn explains the ‘technological imperative’ characterising contemporary processes of rebordering. But the conception of contemporary border regimes as security dispositifs affords to reconsider at least two of the CAM’s propositions. Firstly, abjection and banishment have to be conceived as integral moments of governing human mobility through differential inclusion. Adopting the notion of banishment does not, however, imply a return to the paradigm of exclusion. In contrast to exclusion, banishment does not aim at the repression of mobility, but at its institutionalisation. The abject are kept in constant rotation by being subjected to the paradoxical freedom of the ban ‘to go anywhere except where one wants to go’. 111 This is important to note because it was the paradigm of exclusion that the CAM’s proponents sought to critique and replace with the notion of differential inclusion in the first place. Secondly, the CAM needs a new justification for the analytical-strategical prioritisation of migrants’ practices. It is important to retain this feature of the CAM because it efficiently allows for avoiding a control-biased analysis of technologically ever-more sophisticated borders regimes. But the CAM’s proposition, whereupon migration temporarily precedes the attempts to control and regulate it, becomes untenable in the face of the security dispositif’s risk management approach, which strives to render unknown future behaviours knowable in order to make them actionable and governable. What this pro-active risk management approach brings to the fore is that the CAM’s assumption of a temporal precedence of migration is underpinned by a reductive reading of power relations. 112 It therefore becomes requisite to rethink the concept of autonomy in such a way that it offers an alternative, more convincing justification for analytical-strategical prioritisation of migrants’ practices. This brings me to the final, albeit most crucial, modification of the CAM: the challenge to rethink the meaning of autonomy in relation to migration. To engage with this challenge is necessary in order to develop the CAM as an approach that is no longer prone to the accusation of being based on, as well as contributing to, a romanticisation of migration. It becomes urgent to engage with this challenge because the warranty of the two allegations, which fuel this major critique, increases in the context of biometric rebordering. The analysis of the impact of biometric technologies on migrants’ possibilities to appropriate mobility and rights allows me to indicate two starting points for the task to rethink autonomy as a concept. Firstly, it is important to develop a situated reading of autonomy which captures that mobility is always embodied and relational in order to bring out the diversity of migrants’ lived experiences and practices. This is a prerequisite for restoring the CAM’s capacity to critique the discriminatory effects of biometric borders. The latter implies a simultaneous intensification and concealment of the differentiation of how the border is experienced, depending on people’s subject position in terms of class, ‘race’, gender, country of origin, age and other factors. Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge offers a promising starting point for such a re reading of autonomy. 113 Secondly, a rethinking of autonomy needs to answer the question of what the assertion of an autonomy of migration refers to in the face of biometric border regimes that transform migrants’ bodies into a means of mobility control. What the example of biometric rebordering brings to the fore is that governmental technologies for the regulation and control of human mobility have become so pervasive and intrusive that a rethinking of autonomy has to go beyond its Greek etymology of ‘self-legislation’. Nor is it credible any more to simply equate autonomy with some form of independency, as in the original formulation of the CAM’s core hypothesis in the pioneering work of Yann Moulier Boutang, as cited at the beginning of the article. Autonomy can no longer be thought of as an attribute or a quality inherent to migration. Just as the forms and practices of migration are shaped by, and can therefore not be separated from, the conditions under which they occur, the emergence of moments of autonomy can not be thought independently of the ever-more pervasive and intrusive governmental technologies that seek to control and regulate migration. Autonomy has to be rethought as a relational concept. Ranabir Samaddar’s proposal to read autonomy as ‘the “Other” of governmentality’ might offer a promising starting point for this task. 114 While it is beyond the scope of this article to rethink the autonomy of migration, it should be underscored that this is an endeavour that is both worthwhile and pertinent. Not only because the CAM’s reading of borders as sites of intensive political struggle over the selective denial and direct appropriation of mobility is well equipped to counter the growing de politicisation of border controls. Nor only because the CAM’s conception of borders as conflictive encounters avoids a control-biased analysis that confirms the claims that drive the technologisation of border controls. But also, and most importantly, because the insight of the renowned migration scholar Stephen Castles, whereupon potential migrants ‘do not decide to stay put just because the receiving state says they are not welcome’, is still valid in the context of technologically ever-more sophisticated border regimes. 115 In other words, the question of how moments of autonomy of migration emerge and persist becomes even more pertinent in the face of attempts to diminish migrants’ room for manoeuvre by turning their bodies into a means of mobility control. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Millennium conference in London and at the ‘New Borderlands or Cosmopolitanism from Below’ conference in Oldenburg (Germany). I would like to thank the following people for helpful suggestions and discussions: Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Bernd Kasparek, Anne McNevin, Martin Noack and Vassilis Tsianos. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Millennium , whose comments helped me to refine the arguments presented here. Funding This research was supported by funding from the European Research Council for the project ‘Oecumene - Citizenship after Orientalism’ ERC-AG-SH2. 1. Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘Interview’, in Materialien für einen neuen Antiimperialismus Nr. 5 (Berlin, Göttingen: Schwarze Risse/Rote Straße, 1993), 38. Emphasis in original. 2. Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘Europa, Autonomie der Migration, Biopolitik’, in Empire und die biopolitische Wende: Die Internationale Diskussion im Anschluss an Negri und Hardt , eds. Marianne Pieper et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 167. 3. Important contributions to this debate include: Yann Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat: économie historique du salariat bridé (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1998); Sandro Mezzadra, Derecho de fuga: Migraciones, ciudadanía y globalización (Madrid: Traficantes de Suenos, 2005); Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008); Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, Turbulente Ränder: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). Finally, it is worth mentioning that the concept of autonomy of migration (CAM) has been popularised by Negri and Hardt, albeit not in an unproblematic way: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 212–14. 4. While it is hardly disputed that migration has been securitised in the course of the Europeanisation of migration policy, it is still contested how securitisation should be conceptualised. Benjamin Muller, ‘Risking It All at the Biometric Border: Mobility, Limits, and the Persistence of Securitisation’, Geopolitics 16, no. 1 (2011). Thierry Balzacq has introduced a useful distinction between ‘philosophical’ and ‘sociological’ approaches. The philosophical variant refers to the definition of securitisation as a performative speech act by political elites, as put forward in the pioneering work of the Copenhagen School. Thierry Balzacq, Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Routlege, 2010). Following the sociological reading, this article understands securitisation as a technology of government in the Foucaultian sense. Didier Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, no. 1 (Special Issue, February 2002); Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (London: Routledge, 2006). As such, securitising processes involve multiple actors and dispersed security practices, which are increasingly mediated by identification, information and surveillance technologies. ‘What’s In An Act? On Security Speech Acts and Little Security Nothings’, Security Dialogue 42, nos 4–5 (2011). 5. Gary Chapman, ‘Shaping Technology for the “Good Life”: The Technological Imperative versus the Social Imperative’, in Technology and Society: Building our Sociotechnical Future , eds. Deborah C. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). 6. Jørgen Carling, ‘Migration Control and Migrant Fatalities at the Spanish–African Borders’, International Migration Review 41, no. 2 (2007). 7. Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, Escape Routes ; Rutvica Andrijasevic, ‘From Exemption to Excess: Detention and Deportations Across the Mediterranean Space’, in The Deportation Regime: Sovereignity, Space and the Freedom of Movement , eds. Nicholas de Genova and Nathalie Preutz (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 8. Jørgen Carling, ‘Unauthorized Migration from Africa to Spain’, International Migration 45, no. 4 (2007). 9. Anthony Amicelle et al., ‘Catalogue of Security and Border Technologies at Use in Europe Today’ (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 2009), 25–9. 10. Julien Jeandesboz, ‘Beyond the Tartar Steppe: EUROSUR and the Ethics of European Border Control Practices’, in A Threat Against Europe? Security, Migration and Integration , eds. Peter Burgess and S. Gutwirth (Brussels: VUB Press, 2011). 11. Ben Hayes and Mathias Vermeulen, Borderline: The EU’s New Border Surveillance Initiatives (Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2012). 12. EURODAC stores the fingerprints of apprehended border crossers and asylum seekers in order to facilitate the implementation of the Dublin II regulation, which stipulates that asylum seekers have to lodge their application in the member state through which they have entered the EU. Yet, EURODAC is also increasingly used for the re-identification of irregular migrants, thereby resembling a prime example of ‘function creep’, that is, the usage of databases for purposes beyond initially stated objectives. The VIS will soon be the largest biometric database in the world as it stores the fingerprints and facial images of the up to 20 million people who annually apply for a Schengen visa, for a period of five years. Dennis Broeders, ‘The New Digital Borders of Europe: EU Databases and the Surveillance of Irregular Migrants’, International Sociology 22, no. 1 (2007). The SIS is the oldest EU database for migration control purposes. The second-generation SIS will also store the fingerprints of deported migrants and other ‘undesirable’ persons. Its start of operation has been repeatedly postponed and was rescheduled to begin in April 2013. Evelien Brouwer, Digital Borders and Real Rights: Effective Remedies for Third-country Nationals in the Schengen Information System (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008). Hayes and Vermeulen, ‘Borderline’ , 32. 13. Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘Nicht länger Reservearmee: Thesen zur Autonomie der Migration und zum notwendigen Ende des Regimes der Arbeitsmigration’, Subtropen: Kritik und Versprechen supplement of the weekly paper Jungle World , no. 15 (April 2002). For a good overview of the most influential migration theories, see for instance: Douglas Massey et al., ‘Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal’, Population and Development Review 19, no. 3 (1993). 14. Mezzadra, Derecho de fuga , 45–6. 15. Moulier Boutang, ‘Nicht länger Reservearmee’; Sandro Mezzadra, ‘The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration and Social Struggles’, in The Contested Politics of Mobility Borderzones and Irregularity , ed. Vicky Squire (London: Routledge, 2011); Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, Escape Routes , 77–8. 16. Vassilis Tsianos and Serhat Karakayali, ‘Transnational Migration and the Emergence of the European Border Regime: An Ethnographic Analysis’, European Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 3 (2010): 386. 17. Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat , 16; Mezzadra, Derecho de fuga , 45. 18. Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat. 19. Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayali, ‘Autonomie der Migration. 10 Thesen zu einer Methode’, in Turbulente Ränder: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas , ed. Transit Migration (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007); Mezzadra, ‘The Gaze of Autonomy’. 20. Serhat Karakayali and Vassilis Tsianos, ‘Mapping the Order of New Migration: Undokumentierte Arbeit und die Autonomie der Migration’, Peripherie 25, nos 97/98 (2005): 51. Translation by the author. 21. Nandita Sharma, ‘Escape Artists: Migrants and the Politics of Naming’, Subjectivtity 29, no. 1 (2009): 469. 22. A. Mitropoulos, ‘Autonomy, Recognition, Movement’, in Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization , eds S. Shukaitis, D. Graeber and E. Biddle (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 130–1; Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, Escape Routes , 203. 23. European Commission, ‘ Commission Staff Working Document – Examining the Creation of a European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) – Impact Assessment ’, SEC (2008) 152 Final (Brussels: European Commission, 2008), 4. For a critique of this supposedly humanitarian justification see Jeandesboz, ‘Beyond the Tartar Step. But the justification for the build-up or intensification of border controls through a victimisation of certain groups of migrants is also present in the anti-trafficking discourse of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and certain non-governmental organisations, see Rutvica Andrijasevic, ‘Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in Anti-trafficking Campaigns’, Feminist Review 86, no. 1 (2007); Rutvica Andrijašević, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). The same justification mechanism is also at work in the refugee-protection discourse of the UNHCR: Stephan Scheel and Philipp Ratfisch, ‘Refugee Protection Meets “Migration Management”: The UNHCR as a Global Police of Populations’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (forthcoming) Special Issue on ‘Migration Management and Its Discontents’ . 24. Moulier Boutang, ‘Europa’, 169–70; Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, Escape Routes , 199. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Né qui, né altrove – Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue’, Borderlands e-journal 2, no. 1 (2003). 25. Stephen Castles, ‘Understanding Global Migration: A Social Transformation Perspective’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36, no. 10 (2010). 26. Mario Tronti, ‘Lenin in England’, in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis , ed. Red Notes (London: Red Notes and CSE, 1979). 27. Moulier Boutang, ‘Europa’, 170. 28. Bojadžijev and Karakayali, ‘Autonomie der Migration’; Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Borderscapes of Differential Inclusion: Subjectivity and Struggles on the Threshold of Justice’s Excess’, in Other Spheres of Justice , eds Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra, and Ranabir Samaddar (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 189–94. 29. Mezzadra and Neilson, ‘Border as Method’. Available at: http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en#redir 30. Mezzadra, ‘The Gaze of Autonomy’. The concept of ‘deportability’ asserts in regards to the function of deportations that not their actual execution is decisive, but that already the fact of their possible execution establishes a condition of deportability , which disciplines irregular migrants to a flexible, exploitable workforce. Nicholas de Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2002). 31. Karakayali and Tsianos, ‘Mapping the Order of New Migration’, 50. 32. Bojadžijev and Karakayali, ‘Autonomie der Migration’, 204; author’s translation. 33. See, for instance, the following contributions: Louise Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography 25, no. 3 (2006); Ayse Ceyhan, ‘Technologization of Security: Management of Uncertainty and Risk in the Age of Biometrics’, Surveillance & Society 5, no. 2 (2008); Karine Côté-Boucher, ‘The Diffuse Border: Intelligence-Sharing, Control and Confinement Along Canada’s Smart Border’, Surveillance & Society 5, no. 2 (2008); Benjamin Muller, Security, Risk and the Biometric State (Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2010); Nick Vaughan-Williams, ‘The UK Border Security Continuum: Virtual Biopolitics and the Simulation of the Sovereign Ban’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010); Dean Wilson and Leanne Weber, ‘Surveillance, Risk and Preemption on the Australian Border’, Surveillance & Society 5, no. 2 (2008). 34. Efthimia Panagiotidis and Vassilis Tsianos, ‘Denaturalizing “Camps”: Überwachen und Entschleunigen in der Schengener Ägäis-Zone’, in Turbulente Ränder: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas , ed. Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). 35. Mark B. Salter, ‘Passports, Mobility, and Security: How Smart Can the Border Be?’, International Studies Perspectives 5, no. 1 (2004): 72. 36. This ‘control bias’ haunts most of the literature on the technologisation of border controls in general. For examples beyond the case of biometrics, see, for instance, Brian Martin and Steve Wright, ‘Looming Struggles Over Technology for Border Control’, Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change 3, no. 1 (2006). Also see, Sarah Wolff, ‘Border Management in the Mediterranean: Internal, External and Ethical Challenges’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 21, no. 2 (2008). 37. Vicki Squire, ‘The Contested Politics of Mobility: Politicizing Mobility, Mobilizing Politics’, in The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity , ed. Vicki Squire (London: Routledge, 2011). 38. Sabine Hess, ‘De-Naturalising Transit Migration: Theory and Methods of an Ethnographic Regime Analysis’, Population, Space and Place 18, no. 4 (2012): 430. Since multi-sited research is based on a radical constructivism, neither the object of inquiry nor the field of study are regarded as pre-given, but emerge in the research process. As ‘the object of the study is thought of as mobile and multiply situated’, the endeavour of multi-sited research lies – in this case – in tracing and tracking migrants’ encounters with border controls across and within multiple sites. George Marcus, ‘Ethnography In/Of the World-System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Geography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1995): 102, 97. 39. Elspeth Guild, Sergio Carrera and Florian Geyer, ‘The Commission’s New Border Package: Does It Take Us One Step Closer to a “Cyber-fortress Europe”?’ in CEPS Policy Brief No. 154 (Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies, 2008). 40. Philippe Bonditti, ‘From Territorial Space to Networks: A Foucaldian Approach to the Implementation of Biometry’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 4 (2004): 466. 41. Benjamin Muller has, for instance, criticised the representation of biometric technologies as a side effect-free solution to balance the alleged tension between security and freedom of movement. The usage of biometric technologies in conjunction with the related risk management approach implicates, however, that unrestricted mobility is only available to those who make themselves completely transparent to border control authorities, as security is equated with visibility. Muller, Security, Risk , 95. Along similar lines, Didier Bigo argues that the technologisation of border controls ultimately translates freedom of movement into ever-more pervasive dataveillance. Didier Bigo, ‘Freedom and Speed in Enlarged Borderzones’, in The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity , ed. Vicki Squire (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011). Moreover, numerous scholars in critical security studies have criticised that the discriminatory effects of border controls become concealed, but nevertheless persist and even intensify, in the context of biometric rebordering. I discuss this point in detail in the next section. 42. Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration’. 43. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, ‘Introduction: Governing by Risk in the War on Terror’, in Risk and the War on Terror , eds Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (London: Routledge, 2008). 44. Muller, Security, Risk , 46–7. 45. Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London and New York: The Athlone Press, 2001), 6. 46. Sunny Omwenyeke, ‘Autonomy of Migration: Where We Stand in the Debate’ (2004). Available at: http://thecaravan.org/node/25 ; Gregor Samsa, ‘Autonome Hintereingänge in die Festung Europa?! Antirassistische Perspektiven in Sachen G8–2007’, AK – Analyse & Kritik , no. 506 (2006) (Zeitschrift für linke Debatte und Praxis) . 47. Martina Benz and Helen Schwenken, ‘Jenseits von Autonomie und Kontrolle: Migration als eigensinnige Praxis’, PROKLA – Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaften 35, no. 140 (2005). 48. Manuela Bojadžijev, Serhat Karakayali and Vassilis Tsianos, ‘Das Rätsel der Ankunft: Von Lagern und Gespenstern. Arbeit und Migration’, Kurswechsel – Zeitschrift für gesellschafts- wirtschafts- und umweltpolitische Alternativen , no. 2 (2003): 48. 49. Sabine Hess and Vassilis Tsianos, ‘Ethnographische Grenzregimeanalyse: Eine Methodologie der Autonomie der Migration’, in Grenzregime: Diskurse, Praktiken, Institutionen in Europa , eds Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2010), 243–4. 50. Sharma, ‘Escape Artists’, 474. 51. Jennifer Hyndman, ‘The (Geo)Politics of Mobility’, in Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography , eds Lynn A. Staeheli, Eleanore Kofman, and Lynda Peake (New York: Routledge, 2004), 174; Kim Rygiel, ‘Governing Borderzones of Mobility Through E-borders: The Politics of Embodied Mobility’, in The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity , ed. Vicky Squire (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 144. 52. Godfried Engbergsen and Joanne van der Leun, ‘Illegality and Criminality: The Differential Opportunity Structure of Undocumented Immigrants’, in The New Migration in Europe: Social Constructions and Social Realities , eds Khalid Koser and Helma Lutz (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998), 208–9. 53. Phizacklea, ‘Migration and Globalization: A Feminist Perspective’, in The New Migration in Europe: Social Constructions and Social Realities , eds Khalid Koser and Helma Lutz (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998), 30. 54. Ginette Vertraete, ‘Technological Frontiers and the Politics of Mobility in the European Union’, in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration , eds. Sarah Ahmed et al. (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 231. 55. Hess and Tsianos, ‘Ethnographische Grenzregimeanalyse’, 243–4. 56. Mezzadra, ‘The Gaze of Autonomy’, 134. 57. Moulier Boutang, ‘Europa’, 171. Emphasis adopted from the original, translation by the author. 58. It should be noted that what Mezzadra seeks to underline with the ‘right to escape’ is ‘the irreducible singularity of the women and men who are the protagonists of migrations’. Mezzadra, Derecho de fuga , 45, translation by the author. But the implications of this stance for the CAM’s core thesis and the underlying understanding of autonomy have remained unexplored so far. 59. Rygiel, ‘Governing Borderzones of Mobility Through E-borders’, 148. Muller, Security, Risk , 12. 60. Template refers to digital representations of particular biometric characteristics, which are generated by means of algorithms. These templates can be stored, exchanged, searched and matched by computers, which fulfil these tasks much faster and more efficiently than human beings, thereby allowing for the move from human to automated border controls. The crucial innovation lies, then, not so much in the usage of biometric characteristics for the verification of a person’s claimed identity, but in the move from analogous information (photography of people’s faces in passports or a simple ink fingerprint) to digital information. See Muller, Security, Risk , 22. 61. Peter Adey, ‘Mobilities and Modulations: The Airport as a Difference Machine’, in Politics at the Airport , ed. Mark B. Salter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 153–6; Bigo, ‘Freedom and Speed’. In the end, trusted traveller programmes intensify the controls not only for those categorised as ‘high risk’, but also for the ‘trusted travellers’ themselves as a biometric passport and ‘background checks of varying range of intrusiveness’ are preconditions for the participation in such a scheme. Benjamin Muller, ‘Travelers, Borders, Dangers: Locating the Political at the Biometric Border’, in Politics at the Airport , ed. Mark B. Salter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 136–7. This dimension of trusted traveller programmes is, however, concealed by a ‘discourse of convenience’, which re-articulates the conventional liberal discourse of rights and responsibilities in a neoliberal fashion as privileges to be invested in. See Muller, Security, Risk , 92–3. 62. Muller, Security, Risk , 89–101; Mathew Sparke, ‘A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border’, Political Geography 25, no. 2 (2005). 63. Vaughan-Williams, ‘The UK Border Security Continuum’. 64. Wilson and Weber, ‘Surveillance, Risk and Preemption’. 65. Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders’, 343. 66. Adey, ‘Mobilities and Modulations’, 156. 67. ‘“Divided We Move”: The Dromologics of Airport Security and Surveillance’, in Surveillance and Society: Technological Politics and Everyday Life , ed. Torin Monahan (New York: Routledge, 2006). 68. Côté-Boucher, ‘The Diffuse Border’; Rygiel, ‘Governing Borderzones of Mobility Through E-Borders’. 69. Adey, ‘Mobilities and Modulations’, 154–5. 70. Muller, Security, Risk , 97–8, 120; Rygiel, ‘Governing Borderzones of Mobility Through E-Borders’. 71. Irma van der Ploeg, ‘Written On the Body: Biometrics and Identity’, Computers and Society 29, no. 1 (1999): 46. 72. Hyndman, ‘The (Geo)Politics of Mobility’; Rygiel, ‘Governing Borderzones of Mobility Through E-Borders’. 73. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 38; Vertraete, ‘Technological Frontiers’. 74. Omwenyeke, ‘Autonomy of Migration’; Samsa, ‘Autonome Hintereingänge in die Festung Europa?’. 75. Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration’; Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity ; Muller, ‘Risking It All at the Biometric Border’; Rens van Munster, Securitizing Immigration: The Politics of Risk in the EU (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 76. Mezzadra, ‘The Gaze of Autonomy’, 229. 77. Bojadžijev, Karakayali and Tsianos, ‘Das Rätsel der Ankunft’, 48. Translation by the author. 78. Mezzadra, ‘The Gaze of Autonomy’, 227. 79. Nicholas de Genova, ‘Alien Powers: Deportable Labour and the Spectacle of Security’, in The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity , ed. Vicki Squire (London/New York: Routledge, 2011), 94. 80. Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity , 52–5. 81. Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration’; Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity , 54–7. 82. Didier Bigo, ‘Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the Social Practices of Control of the Banopticon’, in Border-scapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge , eds Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Jef Huysmans, ‘A Foucaultian View on Spill-over: Freedom and Security in the EU’, Journal of International Relations and Development 7, no. 3 (2004); Julien Jeandesboz, ‘ Les usages de voisin. Genèse, enjeux et modalités des politiques de voisinage de l’Union européenne ’ (Paris: Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, 2011), 369–70. 83. Didier Bigo, ‘Security: A Field Left Fallow’, in Foucault on Politics, Security and War , eds. Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neil (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 98. 84. Bigo, ‘Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception’, 31; Jeandesboz, ‘Les usages de voisin’, 394. 85. Van Munster, Securitizing Immigration , 66. 86. Bigo, ‘Security: A Field Left Fallow’, 107. 87. Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, ‘Introduction: Policing in the Name of Freedom’, in Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe , eds Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1. 88. Bigo, ‘Freedom and Speed’, 33. 89. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 49. 90. Ibid., 18, 69. In order to highlight the importance of the often-neglected economic dimension of the security dispositif, some critical security studies scholars argue that ‘understanding the deployment of the security dispositif requires an analysis of how circulation functions within capitalism in relation to production and labour’. Claudia Aradau and Tobias Blanke, ‘Governing Circulation: A Critique of the Biopolitics of Security’, in Security and Global Governmentality: Globalization, Governance and the State , eds Miguel de Larrinaga and Marc G. Doucet (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2010), 53. 91. Foucault, Security , 65. 92. Ibid., 18. 93. Ibid., 20, 61. 94. It is by now a well-established fact in migration studies literature that only a very small proportion of the population of illegalised migrants in Europe enter clandestinely, estimates ranging between 5% and 10%. See, for instance, Richard Black et al., ‘Routes to Illegal Residence: A Case Study of Immigration Detainees in the United Kingdom’, Geoforum 37, no. 4 (2006): 560; Michael Collyer, Hein de Haas and Franck Düvell, ‘Critical Approaches to Transit Migration’, Population, Space and Place 18 (2012): 408; Michael Collyer, ‘Towards Mediterranean Migration Management? Developing Discourse and Practices’, in Area Working Paper Nr. 54/2008 (Madrid: Real Instituto Elcano, 2008), 2; Guiseppe Sciortino, ‘Between Phantoms and Necessary Evils: Some Critical Points in the Study of Irregular Migrations to Western Europe’, IMIS-Beiträge , no. 24 (2004): 34. 95. European Parliament and Council, ‘Regulation (EC) No 767/2008 of the European Parliament and Council of 9 July 2008 Concerning the Visa Information System (VIS) and the Exchange of Data Between Member States on Short-stay Visas (VIS Regulation)’, Official Journal of European Union , no. 218 (2008): 63. 96. Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, ‘Policing at a Distance: Schengen Visa Policies’, in Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe , eds Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 97. Interview with a training supervisor for senior border guards in the Schengen area (January 2012). 98. European Parliament and Council, ‘Regulation (EC) No 767/2008’, article 1. 99. Broeders, ‘The New Digital Borders of Europe’, 85–6. 100. Philippe Bonditti, ‘Governing the (Im)Probable, Making the Real: Antiterrorism and Contemporary Mutations in the Art of Governing People’ (paper presented at the ‘Government and Freedom: Histories and Prospects’ seminar series, London, 12 January 2010). 101. David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 199. 102. Louise Amoore, ‘Lines of Sight: On the Visualization of Unknown Futures’, Citizenship Studies 13, no. 1 (2009): 18. 103. Philippe Bonditti, ‘L’antiterrorisme aux États-Unis (1946–2007): Une analyse foucaldienne de la transformation de l’exercice de la souveraineté et de l’art de gouverner’ (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, 2008), 501. 104. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, ‘Governance, Risk and Dataveillance in the War on Terror’, Crime, Law & Social Change 43, no. 2 (2005): 163–4. 105. Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, ‘The Surveillant Assemblage’, British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 611–14. 106. Bigo, ‘Freedom and Speed’. 107. A recent issue of the bulletin of the European Migration Network cites a number of 3000 persons who registered multiple applications between January and April 2012 at consulates in one of the six North-African countries, where the VIS has been in operation since October 2011. Hence, the VIS has assisted in the detection of 3000 ‘visa shoppers’ within three months in this region alone. Their applications were all rejected. European Migration Network, ‘EMN Bulletin: A Report from the European Migration Network for the Period January to May 2012’, EMN Bulletin June 2012 . 108. Bigo, ‘Freedom and Speed’; Dennis Broeders, ‘A European “Border” Surveillance System under Construction’, in Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe , eds. Huub Dijstelbloem and Albert Meijer (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Irma van der Ploeg and Isolde Sprenkels, ‘Migration and the Machine-readable Body: Identification and Biometrics’, in Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe , eds. Huub Dijstelbloem and Albert Meijer (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). 109. To prove the opposite is the research interest guiding my dissertation project, which carries the working title: ‘The Visa Information System: Biometric Re-Bordering and the Appropriation of Mobility’. While it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed account of respective practices, it may suffice to indicate some of them. Firstly, abjectified migrants might opt for ‘avoiding the “identity routes” of visa and asylum applications when travelling to Europe’; Dennis Broeders and Godfried Engbergsen, ‘The Fight Against Illegal Migration: Identification Policies and Immigrant’s Counterstrategies’, American Behavioral Scientist 50, no. 12 (2007): 1605. Secondly, the introduction of biometrics does not solve the issue of feeder documents like birth certificates, passports, job contracts and so on upon which the decision to issue biometric documents, like a Schengen visa, is based. Muller, Security, Risk , 19. Thirdly, biometric technologies are introduced in a regime in which corruption is a structural and widespread phenomenon; Alexis Spire, Accueillir ou reconduire: Enquête sur les guichets de l’immigration (Paris: Raisons d’Agir Éditions, 2009). I explore these and other practices of appropriation of Schengen visas in greater detail in my thesis. 110. Jonathan P. Aus, ‘Eurodac: A Solution Looking for a Problem?’, European Integration Online Papers 10 (2006); Benjamin Muller, ‘(Dis)Qualified Bodies: Securitization, Citizenship and “Identity management”’, Citizenship Studies 8, no. 3 (2004). 111. Bigo, ‘Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception’, 26. 112. Anne McNevin, ‘Ambivalence and Citizenship: Theorizing the Political Claims of Irregular Migrants’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41, no. 2 (2013): 193–4. 113. Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988). 114. Ranabir Samaddar, ‘The Politics of Autonomy: An Introduction’, in The Politics of Autonomy: Indian Experiences , ed. Ranabir Samaddar (New Delhi and London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 10. 115. Stephen Castles, ‘Why Migration Policies Fail’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 209.