In this first episode, we’re taking a step back to look at the bigger picture. We will explore how borders and surveillance work to maintain systems of power. We’re digging into how border technologies like biometrics and satellite and camera-based surveillance are not just tools of border enforcement, but tools that deepen systemic exclusion. And we’ll examine how these technologies are increasingly central to European border enforcement and externalisation and how they’re entangled in the broader logic of racial capitalism. Across the globe, from Occupied Palestine, the US-Mexican border and the EU external borders - borders are becoming increasingly digitized and militarized. Surveillance technology at borders is presented as efficient. Neutral. A solution. But let’s be clear: these tools don’t exist in a vacuum. Crucially, they are shaped by political agendas and reflect and reinforce deeper histories of control, exclusion and discrimination.

Take fingerprinting as an example. Originally developed for use in criminal investigations, it’s now used routinely on people on the move. The result of this repurposing? People on the move are treated as suspects, or as the scholar Petra Molnar puts it: criminals unless proven otherwise. Movement itself is framed as a crime, and racialized people are cast as inherent security threats.

In the coming Episodes we want to take you a bit deeper, and understand how the digitalisation of  borders changes border landscapes and mostly how it impacts people themselves? In this first Episode however, we want to talk about the roots of this development, make sense of the politics of border surveillance, and try to understand how we got here basically? 

So let’s dive in! 

M: One way to understand the repurposing of surveillance technology is through the lens of postcoloniality.  Postcolonial scholars have argued that modern surveillance doesn’t just emerge from the modern state, but it has deep roots in colonial rule. 

Across colonies, large-scale biometric data collection was employed to classify and control colonized populations, quite central to imposing colonial logic. In India for example, British colonizers used fingerprinting to establish control over the colonised population and the territory. Similar examples in Algeria, New Zealand, even today over the Maori population. Data collection used to construct racialised distinctions between colonizers and the colonized or between different native populations.  Ideas and constructions about racial differences were used to justify European dominance and “right to rule”. A variety of surveillance methods, travel passes, permit systems in British colonial empires to monitor “dangerous populations”, but also central to “assess” compliance or deviance with western capitalist norms. Deviance  is constructed as danger, which then used to justify colonial violence and further dispossession of land. 

We see a similar risk and security driven logic apply today in the enforcement of the border regimes. Here is an example from the Frontex Risk Analysis 2016 which reads, "The biometric data of many migrants are missing, which prevents law-enforcement authorities in the EU from effectively using the Eudora for the purpose of preventing, detecting or investigating serious criminal offices or even terrorist offenses."  The idea of “unknowness” is framed as a danger and risk, threat to European order, Sachseder and Stachowitsch from the University of Vienna argue that this “reaffirms the need for colonial ordering of chaotic, unknown otherness". 

For example in the Samos Closed Control Access Centre, people on the move were told they have to give their fingerprints upon arrival to  the facility “out  of security reasons” because  they were entering Greece. We will look closer at this  facility in upcoming episodes but I think what you can already see from this framing is that there is a conflation of mobility with risk which is facilitated partly through the use of biometric technology, constructs necessity. 

Biometric technology doesn’t just help to enforce hostile migration policy against people on the move. But it legitimises it. It tells a story: that certain people don’t belong, that their presence is risky, and that their movement must be watched, contained, or stopped altogether. This steady shift to treating migration as a security issue, according to Bruno Oliveira Martins from Peace Research Institute in Oslo, also explains the transposition of military technology for civilian purposes like migration management. 

P: This is what people mean when they talk about a shift from the securitisation to the militarisation of migration? 

M: Yeah by framing migration as a security problem, security companies can offer “solutions” and the use of military-like technologies is justified. The security framing allows migration to be treated as an exceptional political issue and to be exempt from regulation. 

This is especially dangerous in border surveillance. There are very few laws governing the deployment of technologies at the borders. The recently adopted AI ACT, exempts law enforcement in migration contexts from important regulations. It allows for a full exemption for AI systems that are meant for national security. 

Essentially, surveillance technologies are not just systems. They are political instruments that maintain social and racial hierarchies. Like borders “Surveillance serves to maintain colonial order by keeping ‘others’ out.”

When we look at today’s technologies, from drone surveillance in Occupied Palestine, to facial recognition at the US-Mexico border, to biometric scanners in EU detention centres, what we’re really seeing is the continuation of a much older project: the project of managing and controlling movement through systems of racism and coloniality. While this project of management and control reaches far beyond EUropean Borders, in this Podcast we will be staying in Europe. Specifically at the borders encountered along the so-called Balkan Route.
 
Pauline, could you tell our listeners what exactly the Balkan Route is and how it developed over time?

P: The Balkan Route, reaches from Turkey to Greece, crosses through the Balkan countries overland, through the states of North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then through the Member States Romania, Hungary or Croatia, until it reaches western Europe. 
It only really became popular as a route in 2012 and peaked in May 2015 when it represented the quickest and safest route to safety for people fleeing violence in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for people from North Africa, who feared the deadly journey across the Mediterranean Sea. 

M: At least for one year, between 2015 and 2016 the Balkan route was a relatively safer alternative to sea crossings. How is the situation along the Balkan route now?

P: Ten years later this seems almost unimaginable. Violence, Torture, Pushbacks, Death and Disappearence have since marked this route.  At Border Violence Monitoring Network we collect testimonies of people who have experienced violence at and within Europe's border's'  The almost 2,000 testimonies in our database tell the story of brutal rebordering and building of Fortress Europe. 

During our research for this podcast, the more we looked back into these testimonies, into political documents, and the path money takes, the clearer it becomes that technology and surveillance have played a crucial role in the process of rebordering. 

M: Can you explain a little bit more about this?

P: Sure! Let’s follow the money for a bit. The Instrument for Pre-Accession, is the EUs dedicated pot of money for countries currently in the process of joining the Union. Many of those countries are of course in the Western Balkans. Countries like North Macedonia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Albania. We looked into the funding reports of these Programs and found that huge amounts of money were poured into Border Surveillance Technology  as early as 2010. So joining the EU was tied to the conditions that border infrastructure was massively expanded. With that, the EU started to advance its externalisation efforts in the Western Balkans. 

M: So what does this digital infrastructure really look like? How can we imagine this at the EU external borders?

P:  In the coming episodes we will mostly speak about two types of surveillance technologies: situational awareness and biometric technologies

Biometrics are your fingerprints, your facial features, your DNA. Biometric surveillance tech collects this data via fingerprints scanners, iris scanners, face scanners etc. This also includes facial recognition and biometric matching software that rely on advanced machine learning algorithms, to sift through vast amounts of data and identify people from just an image or a finger print. 

Situational awareness are things like drones, satellites, radars. Technologies that help monitor the border are, flag if any boats, or groups of people are approaching the border or if there is any unusual activity.

The presence of both biometric and situational awareness technology at EU borders, has massively expanded in recent years. Often justified by governments by fighting migrant smuggling. Governments have spent an insane amount of money on border surveillance and fueled a whole industry around it.

M: The border surveillance industry is one of the clearest manifestations of racial capitalism. The control of racialized bodies is turned into a commodity, while governments are eager to bend to xenophobic narratives .

P:  You can even find investment advice online that suggests investing in AI for eu border control! As we are recording this Podcast the EU announced its budget for 2028 - 2034 - it shows just how lucrative this industry is.The budget for migration and border management has tripled to 63 billion euros! A look through the EU Tenders Database, reveals that much of this budget goes into equipment for national border control and infrastructure. Its true border control has become a massive profit-scoring industry for tech and security companies. All fueled by a technosolutionist narrative that is increasingly seeping through national and EU institutions. 

M: I know that the term techno-solutionism refers to the idea that there is a technological solution for highly complex societal issues like poverty or climate change. But how does this idea manifest in EU migration policy?  

P: In the context of the EU Migration Policy technosolutionism refers to the idea that advanced surveillance technology can solve the perceived crisis of migration and curb migration. Researcher Matt Mahmoudi has also noted that through this lens, technological interventions are also seen as a way of bypassing the politics of migration and integration. Meaning instead of confronting humanitarian crises at Europe's and xenophobic narratives, power is deferred to a few tech and security corporations to solve the quote on quote crisis of migration.. 

M: So essentially, instead of finding political solutions to the violence caused by border regimes or investing in safe routes, techno-solutionism turns migration into a market. How does that logic play out in practice? 

P: Tech companies and universities are now literally tasked with finding innovative solutions for European migration management through border surveillance. 

When we started looking into the newest developments in bordertech we very quickly came across the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation projects. These are projects funded by the EU research grant. In the context of this grant the EU has invested at least 1.7 billion euros in projects related to the research and development of experimental border control and policing technologies. Some of the more famous ones are called IT Flows or IBORDERCTRL. Often this research is commissioned to specifically respond  to the needs and requests of border and police agencies like Frontex. ROBORDER, for example, was a research and innovation project that was designed to develop advanced drones that would help Frontex’s and border authorities to intercept  people on the move. The project included leading European Defense companies like Elettronica as well as the Greek and Romanian Ministries of Defence. 

M:  Roborder finished in 2024. What has happened ever since? What kind of innovations are trending now? 

P: The newer projects focus on bringing together the newest innovations developed under previous projects. On the website of one of the newest projects, Border Force, it says that it will bring together Sensor. AI-based drones, Threat detection algorithms, Satellite Surveillance and Open source Intelligence to: 

“Support border authorities with automated threat detection of irregular migration and smuggling at sensitive land regions and coastlines in European environmental and weather conditions” 

M:  Just hearing this quote reminds me of the securitisation of migration that we discussed at the beginning of the Episode. That the expansion of border surveillance is fueled by the idea of people on the move are security threats and migration is increasingly framed as a security issue. What are the implications of these research projects?

P: In the context of these research projects, products are developed, tested and temporarily deployed, and one day come on the market. What really happens to the drones, wires, and surveillance robots after the projects close is unclear. 

SHOWNOTES:

I Have Rights. 2025. “They Never Tell Us Anything” Ongoing Data Rights Violations in the Samos CCAC. Available here.

Peter Adey. 2012. Borders, identification and surveillance. New regimes of border controls. Available here.

Petra Molnar. 2020. Technological testing grounds: Migration management experiments and reflections from the ground up. Available here.

Julia Sachseder and Saskia Stachowitsch. 2019. The gendered and racialized politics of risk analysis. The case of Frontex. Available here.

Tahu Kukutai and Donna Cormack. 2022. Indigenous Peoples, Data, and the Coloniality of Surveillance. Available here. 

Weaving Liberation. Digital Policing Harms. Available here.

Evgeny Morzov. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here. The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Available here.

Frontex Operational Agreements with non-EU countries. Available here.

Fact Sheet: EU Budget in security and border management 2028-2034. Available here.


Matt Mahmoudi. 2024. Migrants in the Digital Periphery. New Urban Frontiers of Control. Available here.

Migration Control. Border Profiteers Platform. Available here.

Fabio Chiusi. 2024. Automation on the Move. Available on Algorithm Watch. Click here

Roborder Project Website. Available here.

Border Force Project Website. Available here.

Martins, Bruno Oliveira (2023) Security knowledges: circulation, control, and responsible research and innovation in EU border management, Science as Culture. DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2023.2222739.

Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Michael Strange (2019) ⁠Rethinking EU external migration policy: contestation and critique, Global Affairs 5 (3): 195–202.⁠
Martins, Bruno Oliveira & Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert (2020) ⁠EU Border technologies and the co-production of security ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1851470.

https://www.ainvest.com/news/shoring-borders-greece-migrant-policies-fuel-eu-defense-tech-contracts-2507/