Abstract
The book Security, Risk and the Biometric State presents an analysis of security across two subfields: critical security studies and international political sociology. The author highlights the complex relations among (in)security, risk, identity, and technology as a way to govern society as a whole. In the book’s seven chapters, the author focuses on the conditions that create the securitizing move and substantiates how interests, material/technological conditions, and cultural performances are at the core process of transforming border security into border management.
The classical political border/frontier concept is an administrative check that limits and selects who is allowed to cross. Border management is framed in a risk society around three pillars: (in)security, identities, and technologies. A review of classic sociology of risk, focusing on the links of security technology and identity in the light of the post-9/11 cases, helps disclose the emerging biopolitics that convey politics of fear, surveillance technologies, and discourses of insecurity. The Foucauldian concerns about population management in terms of biological process are recast in terms of productive bodies, consumptive bodies, and risk bodies as a new reconfiguration of biopolitics deployment. Thus, the transformation of physical profile into digital data raises sociological concerns about the physical and the digital self, not only in terms of a dehumanizing approach, but also as it alters the understanding of identity, identification, and identifiable.
The specter of the ‘homegrown terrorist’ is at the core of fear discourse. The politics of fear recalls the existence of an internal threat as a source of apprehension that needs to be under control. Since the rise of the biometric state, the border is considered a static demarcation line, and in risk society, it multiplies, blurring the limits of inside–outside control. The fragmentation of uncontrolled borders, epitomized by the terrorist body, emphasizes the need for technological management to contain anxieties. The most relevant example of borders proliferation, in the author’s view, is the case of Canadian national ID cards. This process of identification is the result of the assemblage, a new strategy that integrates a network of actors (state officials, industry), discourses, and set of rules. This case emphasizes the tight links between industry and policy makers’ decisions, therefore showing the changing perceptions about biometric technologies and the consequences of this application since 2003. This analysis substantiates the idea that, even if the emerging ID card assemblage follows different rationales, an overdetermined field of identity management is created by the application of biometric technologies.
In terms of cultural performances, the author draws attention to the ‘state of mind’ generated by the security narrative, via the role played by the ‘catastrophe’ vision, and uses this as the main argument to support the challenge of security strategies. The ‘catastrophic imagination’ generated by the politics of fear frames the ubiquitous discourse of the need for a managerial safety culture and the consequent dispositifs of biometrics. The dominant imaginaries are framed around the three categories of risk, danger, and catastrophe. Following this idea, the author underlines that border security shifted from the physical imagination of a separation line to a body that crosses it. The deterritorialization of state borders in airports, seaports, etc., by the means and application of a wider spectrum of technologies, is considered significant evidence of a biometric state. By the proliferation of a variety of virtual borders, mobility in itself might represent a threat, substantiating the relevant shifting of state constituency from sovereign territoriality to individual body control, therefore from geopolitical to biopolitical dimension.
Two cases of catastrophe – one of tragic failure and one of successful avoidance – are analyzed to highlight the pattern of uncertainty and vulnerability of evaluating risk management in anticipation or avoidance of fatal events. Social acceptance of the biometric and surveillance technology is constructed in popular culture through television series, movies, and literature, where fiction sometimes surpasses reality. These examples in popular culture are, in the author’s view, not simply mirrors of constitutive norms, but an integral, embodied part of it, playing an essential role in framing a ‘cultural governance’ of risk society. Thus, governing through risk management can be seen as needing a surveillance technology and a popular catastrophic imagination to redesign citizenship and borders.
The North American biometric state is taken as an example to epitomize the attempts to manage and securitize the Canada–US border after 9/11. In particular, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) is presented as a central policy to transform border security to border management and as a redesign of citizenship, for those utilizing the trusted traveler cards (NEXUS for Canada–US border crossing; SENTRI for US–Mexico border crossing, and for commercial vehicle crossings). Parceling and reassembling rights reshapes citizenship, following the principle of security that rules the information package assemblage. The notion of citizenship enters in a cyborg era where the biometric body never decays. It is precisely this process that embodies the author’s interpretation of the ubiquitous and insecure border incorporated within the bodies.
Biometric body scanning is presented to customers as an answer to the governing risk and as an efficient and fast check that bypasses uncertainty. To underline this point, the last chapter, co-written with John Measor, offers a reflection on the mutual constitutive relationship between domestic and foreign policy in a border’s securitization process. A case study of the annihilation of Fallujah, through analysis of population identity reconstruction/rearticulation on the principles of biometrics, is presented as a compelling example of the US homeland security preoccupation with risk–insecurity–danger. Fallujah, following Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer framework, is considered a space of exception in which rights are suspended and authorized extrajudicial acts are no longer identified as a crime. In this problematic war theater, the application of biometric identification technology easily overcomes culture distance misunderstandings and solves the problems of matching spelling of local identities in the identification process. Despite the considerable literature generated by Agamben’s view, the Fallujah case study highlights the convergence of domestic and foreign affairs concerns regarding risk and insecurity; however, with the proper distinction between a war area and non-war territory.
This book makes clear that the solution of ‘governing through the risk’ unveils the obsession of security in the late modern state and calls attention to the blurring demarcation line between domestic and foreign policy. This analysis substantially provides critical review to the dominant political view of security and the ‘neutral’ and ineluctable application of biometric technology. Social reality collides dramatically with the view of this transformation. Migrants trying to cross the US–Mexican border, or the ‘fortress of Europe,’ remind us that the border is not a simple securitization line of homeland, but reflects the complexities of late modernity and the relation between freedom and security.