This article probes the contradictions and unacknowledged risks inherent in the notion of citizenship today. We explore the possible fault lines that citizenship places on the notion of universality, namely the anthropology of contexts in which citizenship and biological self-preservation are being radically decoupled as well as the policies, techniques, and media (biological, health, juridical) through which such decoupling takes place. What concepts have anthropologists brought to the fore to address the emerging "fault lines of survival" embodied in the term citizenship? How have these concepts been taken up, becoming vehicles for resisting, or at least assessing, what has become of citizenship? Moving beyond narrowly conceptualized policy problems and calculations, this article also considers alternative pathways through which the "political" is being mobilized and through which a new politics of rescue appears.

This essay is an ethnographic account of the use of post‐Soviet military ruins in western Ukraine. I describe an encounter with the founder of a commune for persons released from prison, victims of human trafficking, and asylum seekers established in a former nuclear base in Ukraine's western borderland. The commune is an unusual restoration project that is carried out in the interstices of the postsocialist state and of the changing European border regime. As such, it is a compelling site for rethinking dispossession and the possibility of redemption some 15 years after the USSR ceased to exist. The protagonist of this account redeems ruins left behind by the collapse of an empire he was glad to see go, and reproduces precisely that which has been lost in the process of the unmaking of Soviet life, that is the all‐embracing domain of collective work and life.

Since 2015, the European Union and its members have been responding to the increased arrivals of migrants and refugees at Europe's southern shores. The states and societies of East and Central Europe are rarely discussed in this context. Even though their governments support the overall EU policy objectives in the area of freedom, security and justice, they vocally refused to participate in EU 'burden sharing'. In this way these countries earned the label of uniquely xenophobic. This article seeks to complicate this perception by highlighing how civil society in Poland responded to the right-wing Polish government's anti-refugee stance. Through the lens of Aronoff and Kubik's concept of Legal Transparent Civil Society (LTCS) I examine the evolving relationship between the ruling Law and Justice party and civil society organisations, proposing that activities for the benefit of refugees offer an insight into the transformation of civil society in the emerging illiberal political system.

As cyber-physical systems (CPS) become prevalent in everyday life, it is critical to understand the factors that may impact the security of such systems. In this paper, we present insights from an initial study of historical security incidents to analyse such factors for a particular class of CPS: industrial control systems (ICS). Our study challenges the usual tendency to blame human fallibility or resort to simple explanations for what are often complex issues that lead to a security incident. We highlight that (i) perception errors are key in such incidents (ii) latent design conditions-e.g., improper specifications of a system's borders and capabilities-play a fundamental role in shaping perceptions, leading to security issues. Such design-time considerations are particularly critical for ICS, the life-cycle of which is usually measured in decades. Based on this analysis, we discuss how key characteristics of future smart CPS in such industrial settings can pose further challenges with regards to tackling latent design flaws.

This essay is about the role of visual surveillance technologies in the policing of the external borders of the European Union (EU). Based on an analysis of documents published by EU institutions and independent organizations, I argue that these technological innovations fundamentally alter the nature of national borders. I discuss how new technologies of vision are deployed to transcend the physical limits of territories. In the last twenty years, EU member states and institutions have increasingly relied on various forms of remote tracking, including the use of drones for the purposes of monitoring frontier zones. In combination with other facets of the EU border management regime (such as transnational databases and biometrics), these technologies coalesce into a system of governance that has enabled intervention into neighboring territories and territorial waters of other states to track and target migrants for interception in the “prefrontier.” For jurisdictional reasons, this practice effectively precludes the enforcement of legal human rights obligations, which European states might otherwise have with regard to these persons. This article argues that this technologically mediated expansion of vision has become a key feature of post–cold war governance of borders in Europe. The concept of transterritory is proposed to capture its effects.