Ubiquitous border? Information technologies, security and the 'war on terror'

Speaker: Professor Stephen Graham
Date: 11 November 2009
Time: 18:15

Lecture

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How can we reconcile the proliferation of hard, militarised borders, not just within ‘war zone’ cities like Baghdad or the West Bank, but between nations and within cities all over the world, with the simultaneous sense that people and things are becoming ever-more mobile on our ‘globalizing’ planet? What, in other words, is the relationship between the proliferation of transnational and urban circulations that surround globalisation, and a parallel profusion of means of what Ronen Shamir has called “closure, entrapment and containment” in the contemporary world?

In this talk I argue that a fundamental shift in underway in the nature and experience of borders in our world. This is based on new links between geography, information technology and the politics of security. This shift involves nation-states moving away from their roles as guarantors of a community of citizens within a territorial unit, policing links between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Instead, they morph into international organised systems geared towards trying to separate people and circulations deemed risky and malign from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection.

As I demonstrate through a wide range of examples, crucially, this increasingly occurs on both the insides and outsides of territorial boundaries between nation states. In the process, international borders blur into urban and local ones as both are organised through pre-emptive systems of surveillance and IT-based risk management.