Risk, scale, and smartness: digital infrastructures in European integration

The deployment of various digital technologies into the practices and infrastructures of European border management over the last decades can be described as the birth of a European smart border. In this contribution I argue that in order to understand the role that digital infrastructures play in the antagonism between mobility and control at the border, we must take both of its attributes, namely ‘European’ and ‘smart’, seriously. Understanding smartness as foremost an epistemology, I show, through a close reading of a risk analysis seminar given by the European border agency Frontex in 2014, how the notion of risk and the epistemology of risk analysis have enabled the production of both a Europeanized, as well as a digitalized border in Europe. It offered both a solution to scaling up, as well as to knowing the border and confronting the movements of migration. This approach decentres the role of concrete technological artefacts in the study of the emergent European border of the early twenty-first century and the concomitant rise of digital infrastructures in favour of an analysis of the politics of technology.