| Περίληψη: |
This article provides a genealogy of 'smart' border policing before computational and digital technologies, such as Blockchain or Artificial Intelligence gained traction in public administration. First, I analyse the European Union's plans and desires for an interoperability framework in the areas of migration, border policing and security. I show that database interoperability is one of the largest concerns of European public administration in general, and border and migration policing in particular. Second, I focus on plans and implementations of database interoperability between public administration, border control, and policing, as they were articulated in the 1970s and 80s in Germany. Looking at archival documents about the reform of the Central Register of Foreigners, I analyse how public administration imagined and designed data interoperability between migration and policing institutions. I situate these plans as part of larger political concerns about anti-terrorism, labour migration, and European integration. I present three interrelated arguments. First, historically, I show how interoperability, as a technocratic administrative project, was and is continuously reproduced through the fabrication of political urgency and the governmental desire for seamless and unhindered information flow, a process I call infrastructural opportunism. Second, media-theoretically, I characterize interoperability as a theory of communication that is entangled with histories of modernity and empire. I argue that it is not only interoperability in itself that has efficacy in debates on reforming public administration, but that talking about interoperability produces its efficacy. Third, politically, I argue that we must strengthen abolitionist approaches in the study of databases and migration policing, as they provide fundamental structural critiques of border violence beyond reformist approaches to privacy and data protection. As such, this article contributes to the literature on digital migration and border policing, as well as the history of media technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |