Risking it all at the Biometric Border: Mobility, Limits, and the Persistence of Securitisation¹

Abstract

This article considers the emerging security dispositif, particularly in terms of the growing reliance on risk, risk management, and technologies of risk in relation to contemporary border security. With the ongoing application of biometrics in the contemporary mobility regime in mind, the article argues that the use of these technologies, in combination with the widespread reliance on risk management, contributes to the re-imagination of borders and the bodies that cross them. The contention that the securitisation of mobility and bodies that results from this emerging logic of rule and the accompanying commitments to specific identification technologies (biometrics), also relies on a nuanced and complex reading of securitisation well beyond the caricatured accounts of the Copenhagen School.