When was the ‘smart border’? Towards an agenda for historicising the technopolitics of migration and border control

In this article we outline a research agenda for historical inquiry into the technopolitics of migration and border control. We present an intervention against the notion that ‘smart borders’ are phenomena of an ahistorical present and instead seek to grapple with the longer and shorter, changing and permanent legacies, hauntings, and genealogies of the current moment of violent border regimes and their articulation through technologies. By asking ‘When was the “Smart Border”’ we analyse how narratives of progress, innovation and disruption are ignorant of historical genealogies of borders and technology and perpetuate the grave violences of modern border regimes entrenched in colonialism and empire. We take cue from scholarship in Cultural Studies, Migration and Border Studies, Media Studies, Black Studies, Geography and Science and Technology Studies, and propose to understand smartness and borders through entangled temporalities of both continuity and discontinuity. We bring together border studies and technopolitical analysis – by showing how borders are always already historical technopolitical assemblages and how the history of technology must be analysed as structured by evolving regimes of mobility, empire and racialized hierarchisation of people. First, we review literature that has theorized temporality outside of progression and linearity and emphasizes disjointedness and continuity, haunting and afterlives, memory and forgetting in the study of history. Second, we draw two lessons from historiographies of media and communication, and their theorisations of time: first, the dismissal of linear, teleologically progressing histories of technology, from media archaeology and infrastructuralist media studies; and, second, media history’s attention to the social, cultural and political practices around‘new’ media technologies, foregrounding the contingent historical work of negotiating meanings of technologies in situated contexts. Third, we introduce the contributions of the special issue and how they traverse different technologies, practices of knowledge-production, logics and imaginaries, and situated contexts of ‘smart border’ histories.