‘The view from above’ at Europe’s maritime borders: Racial securitization from visuality to postvisuality

Abstract

At a time when the European Union is currently intensifying its electronic frontier through unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, and remotely piloted aircraft and satellite remote sensing devices, it is crucial to ask what this ‘view from above’ in effect enables. Although creating enhanced visibility in the Mediterranean basin of migrants’ crossings, the technological solutions provided by the European Union do not prioritize search and rescue. In analyzing European Union policy documents regarding visibility-making at Europe’s maritime borders, as well as the rationale presented by the industry delivering the technological backbone, this article shows how the ‘view from above’ is not only constructed through data but feeds back into data-generating ‘vision machines’. The working together of the scopic/visual/ocular and the digital/algorithmic/metrical is coined ‘postvisuality’ – a term highlighting the entanglement of image and code and the subsuming of the visual under the digital, or digitality. Postvisuality is framed by Europe’s long history of racial securitization, which in this case facilitates migrants’ data doubles becoming a key locus for financialization and the generation of a surplus for the security and defense industries.

Border panic over the pandemic: mediated anxieties about migrant sex workers and queers during the AIDS crises in Turkey

“…5), and understanding borders as manifestations of national identity (Rabinowitz 2012), surveillance, control of mobility (Mountz 2011), violence (Andersen and Bergmann 2019), and intersectional sociocultural boundaries (Altay, Yurdakul, and Korteweg 2020) has become all the more expedient with the rise of anti-immigration policies and discourses (Van Houtum and Pijpers 2007;Saddiki 2014;Castro Varela and Mecheril 2016). This has sparked researchers not only to revisit already well-studied and theorized borders such as that between Mexico and the USA, the EU's borders, and the Mediterranean Sea (Saddiki 2017;Madörin 2019;Strasser and Tibet 2019;M'charek 2020), but also to shift their attention to other, under-researched borders, such as the borderland between Georgia and Turkey (Akyüz 2017) and the border between Thailand and Myanmar (Joliffe 2015).…”

“…On the other hand, scholars such as Bilgin Ayata (2012) and Jaffer Sheyholislami (2010) show how Kurdish media help to establish transnational belongings and identities that stretch across borders. But not only do media technologies, particularly digital media, facilitate the forging and sustaining of transnational belongings and identifications (Bayramoğlu and Lünenborg 2018); they also serve to intertwine borders with data and code, creating a condition of "postvisuality" that helps to secure racialized border regimes (Madörin 2019). Kira Kosnick (2014), for instance, discusses the new roles played by media technologies in reinforcing borders, not only in the form of surveillance technologies, but also in the circulation of images, texts, and meanings that serve to prevent refugees from migrating to the Global North.…”

The politics and poetics of migrant narratives

“…There is a simultaneous hypervisibility of different categories of mobile populations as well as an apparent post-human design of migration control and surveillance devices. Madörin (2019) in particular scrutinizes the racialized workings of 'post-visual' securitization from above, through advanced technologies including 'aerial vehicles or drones, remotely piloted aircraft, and satellite remote sensing devices' that narrate migrants as data doubles, which subsequently 'become a key locus for financialization and generate a surplus for the security and defence industries' (p. 3). Besides the public-private partnerships that govern migration and enable free flow for some bodies, the political economy of the migration industry also increasingly revolves around commodifying migrant connectivity and migrant labour.…”

“…Through these partnerships, refugee bodies are narrated as ‘biometric assemblages’ (Madianou, 2019: 1), which risk exacerbating hierarchies resulting from bias, ethical concerns, data sharing and breaches as part of a larger turn towards experimenting new technologies on vulnerable populations who cannot opt-out (Leurs, 2020). In this special issue, Anouk Madörin (2019) analyses Europe’s maritime borders, showing technological innovations do not prioritize search and rescue, but reinforce historical ‘racial securitization’ through ‘visual–digital’ means (p. 3). Steeply growing expenditure on surveillance and border control technologies in the European context is strongly at odds with the parallel situation of increasing numbers of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea.…”

“…It is then the task of the researcher to bring these different, divergent or at times colliding viewpoints together in a meaningful way, making evidence-based recommendations for change. (d'Haenens and Joris, 2020: 438) The group of actors narrating migration explored in this special issue include diaspora and migrant journalists (Kirk, 2019;Voronova, 2019), government officials and policy makers (Madörin, 2019), migrants and refugees (Dhoest, 2019;Greene, 2019;Løland, 2019), diasporas (Almenara-Niebla and Ascanio-Sánchez, 2019) and social media publics (Bozdağ, 2019). The narration of migration happens through anti-migrant social media memes, visual surveillance, digital fingerprints, asylum interviews, smartphone use, refugee selfies and news accounts.…”