Many journalists, scholars, activists, and regular people who live within the US-Mexico borderlands describe the border today as—suddenly—being “militarized,” whether by the appearance of military personnel, or by the use of military technologies like drones, intrusion detection systems, and weapons. But the border itself is war: it is war by other means. Focusing on “militarization” as if it were a contemporary phenomenon—particularly the new use of tech—glosses over the long history of the US as an empire-nation. For centuries—from the dispossession, displacement, and enclosure of Indigenous peoples through colonial settlement and frontier making since the 17th century, all the way to the US–Mexico War in the mid-19th century—military action and violence has created and maintained US borders.
The making of borders is a central process for nation states and unfolds by differentiating those that belong from those that do not. Citizens hold a privileged position in contrast to noncitizens. But politicians and government officials go to great lengths to treat some citizens and noncitizens as less worthy, less valuable. This was the case with Indigenous enclosure, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, and temporary agricultural workers (like the Bracero Program). The persistent practice of differentiation—of making the Other a kind of enemy threat to exclude from the nation—demonstrates how geopolitical borders emerge from military logics, from enacting an inequality of force that favors an existing political order.
This is why borders don’t require wars to be fought or soldiers to be present for us to say there’s a “militarization.” Instead, the mere existence of borders requires a preexisting exclusionary vision, one that treats difference as something to manage, exclude, and persecute. Borders of nation states are about enacting war-like power relationships, which cleave into the cultural fabric of social relations.
Differentiation unfolds in routine systems, often portrayed as satisfying a technical need. Consider, for example, ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System. This allows users to access information associated with a detained person and their potential location. Detainees are rendered into a data body with their own A-Number (alien number) and biographic details (e.g., name, country of birth, date of birth). Here, locating detainees is treated as a process not of bodies and people with families and community ties, but of information. Information to make a person discrete, manageable, and controllable. Such an informational process is also employed in finding, apprehending, and processing unauthorized migrants. In the early 2000s, the Department of Homeland Security pursued a “system of systems,” hoping to integrate different border enforcement platforms (e.g., ground sensors, closed-circuit cameras, unmanned aerial systems). And currently, Palantir’s ImmigrationOS is a case management system that, according to Business Insider and Wired magazine, integrates information about migrants from multiple government databases to purportedly optimize “near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation.” Information systems routinize the administration of violence as a banal bureaucratic experience seemingly untethered from the racial worldview of human actors.
These systems are designed to create, record, manage, and communicate populations as information (e.g., biographic, biometric). Information infrastructures not only control but also determine how populations and the border are known. They seek to govern the conditions of knowing, which shapes future conditions of action. Profit is made in the management of migrant data when third party providers in Silicon Valley—and beyond—design platforms for data extraction and processing. Migrant populations are rendered infrastructural by sustaining so-called innovations in Silicon Valley. More so, enforcement platforms routinize the maintenance of social differentiation—distinguishing between citizens and noncitizens—as a process that multiplies the border beyond the physical boundary line and unfolds through information itself.
For proponents of border security and immigration enforcement, these systems are merely technical matters, or informational problems to be handled through some kind of technological solution. Yet my book The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion (Duke University Press, 2024) shows how the technical is entangled with the social. The book demonstrates how, when it came to US borders, the technical shaped—and was shaped itself, in turn—by questions of identity, frontier imaginaries, and the history of the US as a settler colony and an empire-nation. Borders are constituted through information that is, as media studies scholar Jonathan Beller argues, “the difference that makes a social difference.” In other words, when people approach borders as an informational problem, they stress the sense that this is a technical issue. The book shows that distinction is not isolated from values and that information has tangible impacts on relations between diverse elements—such as between citizens and noncitizens, people and their environment, the present and the past. Living with and against a worldview predicated on the establishment of borders of inclusion and exclusion requires an ability to move in between, to acquiesce and to refuse.
This roundtable, like the book itself, is testament to epistemological and material boundary crossing. When I started research on what is now The Cybernetic Border, I relied on the brilliance and generosity of a wide range of people with whom I maintained deep relations (in thought, in action, and in collaboration) over the years. I wrote the book as I moved between archival sites and as my career took me to new institutional homes, from Ann Arbor (Michigan) to Washington, DC, Ithaca (New York), and Austin (Texas). My colleagues similarly moved in between ways of knowing and thinking, including science and technology studies, border studies, digital studies, US history, and Latina/o studies. Borders, particularly geopolitical ones, require networked sets of people, practices, ideas, institutions, organizations, and material to mark and produce social difference. To understand such a complex process, it’s been critical to think and learn from colleagues like Lilly Irani, Philipp Seuferling, Kalindi Vora, and many more.
Smart borders like the “system of systems” brings together digital platforms, race, and a settler structure of feeling to govern those deemed enemies to the nation.
Investigating the epistemic infrastructures of modern US borders, The Cybernetic Border argues that these infrastructures are expressions of persistence and difference. Some people persist in imagining “the nation and its citizens” in contrast to a multitude of populations thought to threaten their sense of the nation. Today, many government and elected officials use language like “invaders,” “enemies,” “threats,” “terrorists,” and more to describe migrants (and noncitizens) in the US. Some of this language, however, is not new. Moreover, the means through which populations are differentially treated changed over time.
Throughout the book, I reconstruct scenes to understand what constitutes our contemporary sense of borders. What ideas, political objectives, and material arrangements are brought together by actors in government, the military, industry, and higher education to create our understanding. Chapters 1 through 3 scrutinize the prescriptions performed during Air Force military exercises, the operation of the intrusion detection system in the 1970s, and the experimental deployment of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in border enforcement since the War on Terror. These scripts reveal the historical biopolitical project of the US empire-nation, which finds its enemies—Indigenous peoples, Latina/o/e, Arab, and Muslim migrants, and unauthorized border crossers—and casts them into an expendable mode of social existence. They matter only to the extent that they justify the construction and operations of the cybernetic border. Chapter 4, on the other hand, explores how artists and activists examined and made plain the limitations of the cybernetic border. They used different techniques to contest the sovereign project of borders, of making territory and people. Their work, I argue, opens a path beyond the constructs of nations and the recurrence of enmity.
We need to understand border enforcement and borders as ensembles mixing the social and technical in the management of inclusion and exclusion. Conceiving of social relations as distinct from technology reduces or minimizes its significance; not only in making possible social relations, but in playing a role in shaping such relations.
The kind of borders I study are the ones constructed using digital technologies. One common description of these technologies is the term “smart borders,” which is a digital infrastructure comprising a network of technologies and practices such as aerial support, UASs, ground sensors, Border Patrol stations, agents in vehicles, and more. I propose we understand this as a “cybernetic border”: a complex, interlocking system of information.
The cybernetic border prioritizes the production, processing, circulation, and communication of data as a means of enacting social inclusion and exclusion. This is not how borders were always produced. But, today, this is a dominant approach to border making that has undergone multiple changes since its emergence in the mid-20th century. The use of science and technology in border enforcement highlights that the border is not some “line in the sand.” The border today is and is made through sociotechnical arrangements centering data in the regulation of racial difference.
Smart borders like the “system of systems” brings together digital platforms, race, and a settler structure of feeling to govern those deemed enemies to the nation. With information as the difference that makes a social difference and information technologies as structuring and coordinating entities, the cybernetic border orders how people are known. It is an epistemological order of things and beings. Whenever we talk about border enforcement and the border, we must analyze and interrogate how sociotechnical arrangements identify targets and classify them, and how it organizes the practices of identification, capture, containment, and expulsion. The cybernetic border designates the legal categories of rule and their exceptions. Its study and critique is not only an effort to understand the politics that such regime makes possible but an effort to envision a world beyond the unbearable endurance of enmity. 