The technopolitics of border security R&D: Shaping the EU’s border in the Security Research Programme

Introduction

Controlling mobility at the EU’s borders is increasingly shaped by an idea of ‘techno-solutionism’ (Trauttmansdorff, 2023) where policy controversies and problems are sought to be solved by the application of ‘innovative’ technologies. This line of thinking has stimulated investment in the research and development (R&D) of security technologies by the EU. Within its large-scale Research Framework Programme (FP) Horizon 2020 (H2020), from 2014 to 2020 the EU invested more than €1.4 billion in 340 funded projects on security (European Commission, 2022a), €260 million of which went into specific projects on border security. ¹ Border security also remains one of the focal points in the EU’s security R&D programme ‘Civil Security for Society’ under the umbrella of the Horizon Europe FP until 2027. The ‘technopolitics of security’ (Müller and Richmond, 2023) at the border are therefore increasingly shaped at multiple levels of the Security Research Programme (SRP), ² both in terms of programmatic decisions and in concrete technological development. This article thus creates an understanding of R&D as a set of political practices through which technological devices are not merely developed, but rather, perceptions and decisions of security and the border are shaped (Bourne et al., 2015; Martin-Mazé and Perret, 2021).

The main argument of this article is that R&D is entangled with political structures and conceptualizations of borders, making it a vital element in shaping how security and control are produced at the border. Ontological assumptions of borders and security are reproduced and renegotiated in multiple practices of R&D, since R&D in the specific form of the FPs emerges from these assumptions. Hence, this article builds upon academic debates that have engaged with the role of technologies at the borders and the specific political implications of R&D. Previous work has interrogated how understandings and decisions of security have been inscribed into technology development at both programmatic levels and R&D projects (Bourne et al., 2015; Martin-Mazé and Perret, 2021; Valkenburg and van der Ploeg, 2015). I contribute to these literatures by drawing on the concept of ‘borderwork’ (Frowd, 2018; Rumford, 2013; Vaughan-Williams, 2008) through which I understand R&D as productive of the border. R&D as borderwork consists of a dispersed set of practices that reaches from the larger scale of setting up the framework in the EU’s Research Framework Programmes to the specific tasks of developing a single device in the course of a project. Moreover, in this article R&D is understood not only to engender the border in a material, infrastructural sense, but especially as productive of practices and logics of governing (Rose, 1999; Yuval-Davis et al., 2019).

R&D as being productive of logics of governing mobilities is a result of different knowledges and forms of epistemic work carried out by a variety of institutions. As border control has emerged as a comprehensively technologized field, for example through databases and registration infrastructures (such as the Schengen Information System or the Visa Information System) or surveillance systems (particularly EUROSUR), security practitioners perceive a political imperative to constantly improve and further develop infrastructures of security and control and promote technologies as solutions for policy problems (Bellanova and Glouftsios, 2022; Jeandesboz, 2016; 2017). Consequentially, border security institutions have increased their efforts in participating in the FPs through structural changes and specific administrative practices. For instance, the European Commission as well as two powerful EU executive agencies in the field of border control, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) and the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (eu-LISA), have established respective units for research and innovation that work specifically on technology development and technological innovations within the FPs and have established modes of mutual cooperation (Martins, 2023). This article thus seeks to grapple with ‘broader legislative, political, and administrative transformations in the European bureaucratic order’ (Pelizza, 2020: 263) that are engendered through the techno-solutionist approaches of R&D. This approach also follows up on Müller and Richmond (2023), who state that technology development ‘reflects the priorities and inequalities of the societies within which it occurs and the interests of state hierarchies and ruling elites’ in order to understand how these political structures not only produce security, but problematize how security itself is produced in terms of the underlying power relations.

However, the article also underlines the challenges to the techno-solutionist underpinnings of R&D through the lack of implementation of R&D projects in operational contexts (Boswell and Besse, 2023; Jaffe and Pilo’, 2023). Projects often remain at the stage of prototypes that, for various reasons, are not implemented by border polices. This article addresses this issue by showing that R&D as borderwork cannot be understood only through its material outcomes. Rather, following Pelizza’s (2020: 264) statement that ‘[w]hile some procedures remain at the stage of proposals, they nonetheless suggest how things could be otherwise’, through being interwoven with ideas of bordering, R&D produces knowledges and imaginaries of possible bordering practices. This means that R&D is seen as a political programme that realizes imaginaries of contemporary and future bordering infrastructures through technological development (Jasanoff, 2015; Jasanoff and Kim, 2009). These imaginaries are often deeply entangled with power relations and logics of control at the border that (re)produce exclusionary and violent structures, where R&D locks in these through its institutional politics and practices (De Genova, 2013; Isakjee et al., 2020; Jones, 2017; Pallister-Wilkins, 2022). Moreover, as this article shows, R&D engenders specific political and administrative settings which shape the politics of knowledge and expertise in the field of border security by privileging specific forms of expertise that are formative for the border (Boswell, 2008; Scheel, 2022; Scheel and Ustek-Spilda, 2019). In doing this, my argument is that by understanding R&D through its characteristic as set of political practices, rather than its material products, we can better understand emerging forms of bordering.

The article starts with a conceptual discussion of how R&D can be understood as a form of ‘borderwork’ that shapes how the EU governs its external borders, followed up by outlining methodological challenges. In the ensuing empirical analysis, I delve into three levels where the borderwork of R&D is performed in different aspects. Here, I engage with the making of research programmes within the Commission, the shaping of programmes and projects through security knowledge performed by the agencies, and how the specialized, dispersed practices of R&D in the projects are related to the political objectives of bordering the EU through connecting the work in the ‘laboratories’ (Bourne et al., 2015) with the work at the political and administrative level. Through this analysis, my research addresses a crucial gap of understanding the political processes that are not only ongoing inside of laboratories, but how these are enmeshed with larger structural decisions and thus reciprocally shape the trajectories of technology development in the FPs. In doing this, my work contributes to the debates on border technologies by centring political processes attached to technology development as crucial factors in the bigger ‘infrastructuring’ of the technological borders (Dijstelbloem, 2021).

Understanding R&D as borderwork of security and control

R&D consists of various heterogenous actions that encompass administrative practices of funding as well as political practices of negotiating working programmes and everyday research practices within the laboratory (Bourne et al., 2015; Grünenberg, 2020). My conceptualization thus follows up on the work that understands technology development as a ‘translation’ of security, where political problem formulations are rendered into concrete sociotechnical devices (Bourne et al., 2015; Valkenburg and van der Ploeg, 2015). However, I conceive R&D more broadly as being ‘aimed to design devices that would materialize borders in specific ways’ (Martin-Mazé and Perret, 2021: 21). R&D as a set of heterogeneous practices is thus understood to contribute to the emergence of a specific form of the border that entangles logics of security and control with the structure of the border (Vaughan-Williams, 2008; Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). In this sense, the border is an instrument of controlling mobility (Nail, 2016) that is expanded and extended through R&D.

R&D constitutes logics of security and control in the technical decisions, such as design and functionality, that shape practices of controlling mobilities. To this end, I understand the border as not only a material infrastructure, but ‘bordering’ as one of ‘the ideals or principles that should guide the exercise of authority’ (Rose, 1999: 26). Borders are thus both physical structures and parts of imaginaries of political and societal orders. In this understanding, the border is an instrument of bifurcation, filtering and deterrence of mobility (Nail, 2016). Logics of bordering address ‘not only about who moves and who does not, but also about who controls whose movements’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 4). Bordering, in this sense, is also co-constitutive with the construction of mobility categories as it comprises ‘the political, legal and racialising mechanisms through which some people are labelled and governed’ (Tazzioli, 2020: 2).

As one of the mechanisms that governs and therefore constitutes these ontologies of mobility, I conceptualize R&D as a form of ‘borderwork’ (Frowd, 2018; Rumford, 2013; Vaughan-Williams, 2008) through which the border is produced in different spaces, such as programme committees and project consortia. Borderwork ‘alerts us to the wide variety of bordering activity that may exist, the diversity of interests at work in this bordering, and the varied spaces within which this activity occurs’ (Rumford, 2013: 172). Understood through the ‘processual turn’, R&D engenders forms of control in spaces that both are territorially away from geographical borders as well as not traditionally linked to practices of border control (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 19). These forms of borderwork ‘are not simply discrete or isolated forms of action, but rather focal points in diffuse networks that pull together myriad policy actors, territorial locations, forms of expertise, and institutional competition’ (Frowd, 2018, 30). Thereby we can also understand how R&D engenders new forms of institutional powers and structures (Pelizza, 2020) through logics of bordering and control spilling over to other policy areas, what Philippe Frowd (2022) succinctly describes as ‘borderwork creep’. Moreover, R&D becomes a means of exerting control at borders while being spatially dispersed, rendering it into a form of ‘remote control’ (FitzGerald, 2020). The conceptualization of R&D as ‘borderwork’ thus allows to understand how through politically framing R&D as a crucial element of border control by means of agenda setting and funding, EU institutions further centralize the means of mobility control (Torpey, 2018: 5).

Most importantly, R&D is understood to be productive of specific rationalities of governing the border (Rose, 1999). Through the borderwork of R&D, security and control are intertwined with the everyday practices and politics of security, rather than being framed as exceptional (Neal, 2019; Nyman, 2021; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016). This leads to a constant renegotiation of what constitutes (in)security and threats at the border (Huysmans, 2006; Vaughan-Williams, 2021). In this sense, R&D is not exclusively defined through the material outcomes in terms of technological devices, but rather through its entanglement of material developments and the reproduction and renegotiation of political ideas about mobility control. This conceptualization allows for an understanding of the productive character of R&D in bordering, even though technologies are possibly failing to reach their envisioned effect (Boswell and Besse, 2023; Jaffe and Pilo’, 2023).

These knowledges and imaginaries revolve mainly about questions of what constitutes threats and insecurities and which modes of security and control need to be enabled. In terms of mobility, security and control rests upon categorizations of people on the move that deem them as either ‘risky’ and ‘threatening’ or as ‘bona fide’ travellers whose mobility should be fostered (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018; Franko, 2011; Tazzioli, 2020). These categorizations are inextricably linked to the border as a device of allowing and prohibiting movement at the same time (Nail, 2016). How these categories of mobility are constructed as security risks is thus ‘a political practice, and not an essential state’ (McCluskey, 2019: 11). Borderwork as a political practice constructs categories of mobilities that are desired or undesired, facilitated or obstructed, based on framing those as illegal, risky and insecure (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018; Franko, 2020; Huysmans, 2006; Stachowitsch and Sachseder, 2019). Logics of security and control engender a juxtaposition of working to enable and obstruct mobility. Through this, they create a rationale to enable modes of ‘knowing’ and ‘predicting’ movement in order to be able to facilitate or deter mobilities (Aradau and Blanke, 2017; Jeandesboz, 2021) As Walters (2006: 192) states, the logic of control at the border ‘filters out, and constitutes a risky, excluded remainder’.

Control is thus a main factor in ‘making’ (Tazzioli, 2020) migration as a form of mobility that is articulated to be governed through logics of filtering and simultaneously including and excluding. In this, the simultaneous enabling and obstructing of movement in the logics of security and control produces ‘different subjects whose movements are to be monitored, facilitated, restricted, or inhibited’ (M’charek et al., 2014: 470). Academic debates have described these modes of producing mobility categories as entangled with racializing and exclusionary power relations (Achilleos-Sarll et al., 2023; Tazzioli, 2021). Understanding R&D as a borderwork shaped by logics of security and control that simultaneously facilitate and obstruct certain forms of movement thus means to understand practices of R&D as (re)productive of racialized and exclusionary power relations. This also challenges the ‘neutrality’ of techno-solutionism, but rather regards the development of technologies as shaped by sociopolitical power relations.

Methodologies in a dispersed field

One major challenge that arose while I was doing the research for this article was the dispersed nature of the apparatus of R&D in border security. My objective thus was interrogating the structures that ‘both constitute and materialize out of highly mediated relations and the near absence of connections between people’ (Feldman, 2012: 6). In this sense, practices of mediating these relations are central research objects, for example in terms of how different forms of knowledge are transformed into common documents. It also means to account for the various material and institutional realities of actors involved in the borderwork of R&D and to find ways to ‘participate in the enactment of those realities’ (Law, 2004). In order to uncover how entanglements of bordering and R&D engender practices of border security and control, my research thus focused on creating knowledge and data about interactions between key actors, their everyday procedures and their understandings of their labour.

Interviewing enabled me to ‘learn about places we have not been and could not go and about settings in which we have not lived’ (Weiss, 1995: 10); to re-enact the realities of those involved in the borderwork of R&D, I draw on interview material of 17 interviews ³ that I conducted between spring 2020 and summer 2021. I spoke to public officials as well as researchers involved in projects that were funded under the FPs. The interviewees were selected following Fujii (2018) through an iterative method in which criteria for selecting interviewees were adapted throughout the research process, for example in terms of professional ranks, institutional affiliation or engagement with specific sets of practices in the R&D process. Moreover, I draw on the observation of a small number of online events, such as meetings between EU agencies, researchers and industry actors or project presentations. In addition to this data collection, I analysed documents such as strategies and working programmes in order to interrogate the imaginaries and political propositions therein. Data analysis occurred through coding inspired by Charmaz’s (2006) approach, where I developed initial codes in every document or interview and then developed larger categories – such as practices of R&D, political imaginaries or power relations – that served as a framework for the analysis

Researching a dispersed security apparatus, which is simultaneously transparent regarding R&D but sometimes more secretive regarding border security, created challenges both in terms of access to sites as well as in specific challenges about positionality. In terms of access, the fragmented nature of the field meant also to face different sorts of scrutiny in terms of institutions’ openness to research (Dijstelbloem and Pelizza, 2020; Kalir et al., 2019). This reflected, for example, in terms of interview access and in developing strategies to circumvent possible obstructions of access. To this end, I identified a heterogeneous set of actors, particularly in the security realm, to get access to different forms of knowledge. In doing this, I often relied on informal methods to identify and contact research participants (Frowd, 2018). In terms of my own positionality, researchers regarded me as a colleague and public officials often had a normative understanding of a researcher’s work, therefore they were not always expecting critical engagement. However, as Marieke De Goede (2020: 112) reminds us, there are ways of how ‘critical practice can be leveraged through “thinking with” professionals and practitioners – rather than denouncing them’. While through my work I sought to challenge modes of producing insecurity (Aradau et al., 2015), this meant to carefully approach the discursive positions of professionals and practitioners and how these produce R&D as modes of security. Furthermore, it also meant to detach the individuals from the structures they were working and critiquing these structures while reflecting about the ethical handling of the individual research participants (Grassiani, 2020). Through this approach, I shed light on power structures by simultaneously attempting to critique those by understanding their more mundane workings.

The borderwork of R&D – ‘making’ programmes, developing technologies

The making of R&D as borderwork starts in a variety of strategic decisions and visions at the EU level. The ‘Security Union Strategy’ which represents the major strategic document for the interior security policy of the EU highlights the role of R&D for, as the Commission states, ‘supporting’ the security policy of the bloc (European Commission, 2020). Similarly, a staff document of the Commission envisions R&D as ‘enhancing’ security policy (European Commission, 2021a). The documents and strategic endeavours are one departure point of unpacking how R&D constitutes borderwork and how it is shaped by specific power relations at the border. The conceptualization of R&D as practice in security and control thus shows the aforementioned ‘borderwork creep’ (Frowd, 2022) where border security actors attempt to exert their powers of bordering through an expanding set of practices (Martins et al., 2022).

The border is shaped by an entanglement of power relations: it comprises powers of enabling or obstructing mobility, of forms of controlling and defining threats and insecurities as well as of including and excluding (Basaran, 2008; Brambilla, 2015). These power relations manifest in myriad forms of borderwork by actors across the EU – reaching from decisions of granting or prohibiting entry to the design of large-scale systems in the field of border control (Bigo, 2014; Glouftsios, 2019). R&D as borderwork thus needs to be understood against the backdrop of institutional powers in agenda setting, but also embedded in broader societal power relations in terms of inclusion and exclusion. In order to make sense of R&D as borderwork, it is thus crucial to unpack how actors use their specific positionalities in shaping the research programmes and projects. This comprises policymaking powers, such as by the Commission, as well as the power of decisions on insecurity and control taken by the agencies (Léonard and Kaunert, 2022). These power relations thus define who can and cannot shape R&D and thereby are a crucial prerequisite to understand the specific forms in which R&D functions as borderwork within the EU’s ‘culture of border control’ (Zaiotti, 2011).

I found R&D to be a control-driven practice, which includes security actors as well as industry actors within the projects, but excludes perspectives from people on the move, especially from migrants. Projects rarely engage with advocacy groups and NGOs, but rather give primacy to security actors and industry (Interview 1). Priorities within the programmes are thus shaped through the expertise of security actors and remain uncontested by those who are controlled (Scheel, 2022). In this sense, R&D also represents a form of ‘epistemic borderwork’ that works towards ‘shutting out perspectives that expose the injustice of the border itself’ (Davies et al., 2023). This is an important analytical note to make, as it underpins how R&D is currently used as a tool to produce a specific border and obstructs the contestation of borders, thereby locking in existing power relations.

In the following sections, I unpack the borderwork of R&D at three distinct levels that encompass agenda setting, knowledge production and technological development. I start with the level of the Commission, where I argue the structuring of R&D in border security takes place in the formulation of concrete working programmes and calls. I then expand my analysis to the powerful security actors, especially the EU’s executive agencies, and address the modes of how they shape these programmes, but also the more manual labour within the projects through their specific positionality. The final level of analysis is the borderwork of R&D within the projects, in which the entanglements of policy, security knowledge and everyday labour of R&D are uncovered. This approach allows me to follow the political visions, knowledges and practices at different levels of R&D and give insight into the multiplicity of political processes and structures that the field of R&D engenders.

Conclusion

Bourne et al. (2015: 321) rightfully state that ‘we cannot fully understand . . . the operation of security technologies without understanding how such devices were funded, designed, crafted, adapted, and tested before being deployed’. This article has combined an analysis of how R&D in the EU is shaped through political ideas of the border and how projects in those frameworks produce borders and reify logics of security and control. It has shown that R&D comprises a variety of practices from a multiplicity of actors that are mediated (Feldman, 2011) through the FPs and reassembled in the laboratories of the projects. In mediating through the making of the programmes, logics of bordering, security and control are entangled with practices of R&D and render those into political instruments to govern migration and mobility at the border. By expanding our understanding of how borders are produced temporally and spatially detached from the geographical border, the main contribution of this article therefore lies in showing how specific borders are produced through various forms of labour and how bordering encompasses a constantly expanding set of practices (Frowd, 2022). In doing this, my work contributes not only to more specific ongoing debates on the role of technology in bordering, but also in broader debates on how borders are engendered, and understanding that how they take violent, racializing shapes is a result of political processes. This article thus challenges the ‘solutionist’ framing of R&D by critiquing how processes of technology development are processes of bordering.

At the same time, R&D projects show what is feasible at the border to reach specific policy objectives and how they are reshaped. While I have shown how borders are negotiated and produced in the FPs, I have only briefly addressed the implementation into the ‘operational’ sphere, which is not always a clear-cut process, and often projects remain at the stages of proposals (Pelizza, 2020: 264). R&D thus does not necessarily make the border exclusively through producing material technologies that are used to ‘secure’ and control, but rather, through producing ideas that shape political visions and endeavours of mobility control. In this sense, R&D is a crucial part of the perpetual (re)negotiation and (re)imagination of security and control at the borders. Nevertheless, the issue of operational implementation and its political consequences warrants further engagement for future research on R&D in security contexts.