Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence: Resisting Borders in an Age of Global Apartheid (Abolitionist Papers)

The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This book exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence, revealing how the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. The high-tech system of borders developed by these states employs a range of technologies, including immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, and data fusion centers. These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in this book shed light on this new threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it. The organizers, journalists, and scholars in these pages are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.