Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, edited by Mizue Azeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer (Haymarket Books, 2024)
The images of tech titans standing behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and of Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute days before addressing the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, speak eloquently to the wedding of racism and technological tools. Data collected by Meta is packaged and sold not only to advertisers but also to data brokers, like LexisNexis or Thomson Reuters, which sell digital profiles of unsuspecting individuals to state agencies that store them in servers managed by Amazon. Security and policing agencies use these tools to circumvent rights to privacy and to sweep away people considered undesirable, from migrants surviving detention camps or living as our neighbors to ordinary urban residents walking under mundane streetlamps equipped with surveillance cameras.
This past summer, I attended an academic panel that focused on data, technology, and border enforcement. Not a single person mentioned the words “race” or “racism.” The overarching analysis focused on correcting the errors generated by existing technologies. For example, facial recognition technology used in European migrant camps generates false positives against nonwhite people; it misidentifies them, and they are then subjected to greater control, deprivation of resources, or punishment.
Analyses that fail to notice the workings of race and racism in technologies assume that once we get better data through more expansive data collection, the problems will be solved through technological upgrades. With no discussion of existing regimes of power and hierarchy, such analyses prove incapable of even approaching, much less addressing, the core problems posed by entanglements of technology in preexisting structures of imperial, racial capitalism that produce border enforcement regimes and migrant detention camps in the first place.
Analyses that fail to notice the workings of race and racism in technologies assume that once we get better data through more expansive data collection, the problems will be solved…
Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, edited by Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer, does this essential work, bringing together organizers and scholars working at the intersections of technology and state violence. It examines how technology is fueling the expansion of policing, border enforcement, and other mechanisms of social control deployed against the increasing numbers of people left behind by the workings of global capitalism. Indeed, borders, and the technologies increasingly used to enforce and expand them, make possible a hardening system of global apartheid, “a neoliberal world in which racialized systems of labor control and resource extraction are undergirded by unjust hierarchies of class, race, and nationality,” as the editors describe it.
Borders as laboratories for surveillance
As the editors and authors show, technology itself is not the core problem. Even if corporations and states addressed problems with faulty algorithms or biometric scanners or devised foolproof data collection and storage, those efforts would not solve the problems of policing and carceral regimes, whether at the border or in our cities. Indeed, we could get rid of all the technology and the problems of imperial, racial capitalism would hold strong. But swiftly evolving technologies of control fortify existing structures of domination and change the landscape of organizing in ways that are not always visible or well understood. The book sheds light on this changing landscape and how organizers are already fighting back.
…swiftly evolving technologies of control fortify existing structures of domination and change the landscape of organizing in ways that are not always visible or well understood.
Aizeki, Mahmoudi, and Schupfer focus on key objects of study that reveal the larger trends and problems with technologies of control—border enforcement, domestic policing, digital identification, and “smart” cities. While some of these sites may seem less focused on “the border,” the editors crucially emphasize that the border spills over the lines dividing state territories from each other. It permeates the interior spaces of states, cities, homes, even individual bodies—and extends far beyond any nation’s territory. For example, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not only operates nearly 90 offices in foreign countries, but data sharing agreements with the Department of Homeland Security expand its reach across state agencies to collect biometric data on millions of people. This is what Aizeki calls the “’everywhere border,’ operating at different geographical scales, and involving police, civilians, foreign governments, technology corporations, and more.”
This is why the book focuses on technology and border regimes in particular. Borders are laboratories where such technologies get funded, created, and legitimized, but technologies do not stay still, any more than borders do. In border spaces, corporations and states innovate technologies of control against targeted peoples—migrants; religious and racial minorities; Palestinians; urban residents, especially in working-class neighborhoods; and activists and organizers. Once developed, these technologies become tools in the state’s arsenal that can be deployed against many more. They are already seeping into our social, political, and economic lives in ways that make all of us subject to surveillance regimes, even if we are not yet their primary targets. They are advancing the spread of the border everywhere, facilitating the sorting of lives into the exploitable and disposable versus the worthy and welcome.
Analysis to feed resistance
Each section of the book includes essays authored by scholars and activists that first provide analyses of the problems, often by focusing on specific sites or examples, like the notorious tech company Palantir using the COVID-19 emergency to gain full access to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service registry. Or the malware infiltrating Mexican citizens’ devices to surveil them. Or the UN refugee agency sharing its biometric data on hundreds of thousands of migrants with the very states they need protection from, like Bangladesh and Myanmar. Or the various iterations of “smart cities” that enable pervasive data collection and surveillance of urban residents. The analyses the book offers are both deeply unsettling and necessary to learn.
But Aizeki, Mahmoudi, and Schupfer don’t stop at giving us the lay of the land. They also include interviews with organizers and case studies of organizations that have won successful campaigns. For example, Aizeki’s interview with Jacinta Gonzalez, policy director of the abolitionist organization Mijente, not only breaks down the multiple ways ICE deploys technology to spread its deportation terror. It also walks readers through Mijente’s #NoTechForICE campaign that brought together different groups with interests in challenging corporate collusions that enable ICE’s deportations. These groups included migrant justice organizers and directly affected communities, as well as tech workers and future workers (students), organized Amazon workers, and even investors in tech companies. Gonzalez highlights the many threads organizers can pull to unwind these “fatal couplings” of state violence and corporate power. Such examples of ongoing organizing in action demonstrate how, even against such seemingly powerful and obscure adversaries, ordinary people working together are “chipping away at violent technologies and their political economy wherever we find them.”
The book goes well beyond empowering us with information. It highlights the connections at all levels of government, from the local to the international; between private corporations and public policies; among states of the Global North that collude in sustaining global apartheid; and among organizations and movements across the globe that are fighting against the same corporations and technologies and against the shared root causes of oppression in imperialism and racial capitalism.
The recent US elections that delivered the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government to the party that rallied its base with promises of mass deportations and a locked-down border against migrants only make this book more crucial. These technologies and their intensification of social control represent the “tip of the spear in terms of where policing is going in the future,” Gonzalez says in her interview, and we can anticipate their accelerated use, alongside longstanding, conventional policing technologies like billy-clubs, cages, and bullets. The Trump regime took power armed with battle plans laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—plans which reflected the input of hundreds of organizations and a legacy of racist, exclusionary policy that dates back more than 100 years.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is not only obeying in advance, but has been deploying the same exclusionary, repressive policies as their supposed opponents—shutting down asylum, detaining and deporting migrants, and cracking down on public protest of its abuses of power, particularly its unabashed support for a genocide in violation of domestic and international law. The Laken-Riley Act, which mandates detention of undocumented immigrants accused—not convicted—of theft, including shoplifting, sailed through Congress and passed with bipartisan support. If the party of Trump is neofascist, the opposition party is right-wing. Indeed, organizers and people of conscience have few allies in the halls of power. There is little pretense in Congress of seeing migrants as people. They are only problems to be dealt with, using an expanding range of tools and technologies.
While the US has developed a robust infrastructure to police the “everywhere border,” cracks run through the machine. It is not rock-solid. And as the contributors to this collection show, the work has already begun. Solidarity networks have been formed and continue to strengthen. Insights and resources from previous campaigns, whether successful or not, provide foundations to build on. Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence provides a toolkit that reflects on and continues this work.
Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, edited by Mizue Azeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer (Haymarket Books, 2024)