Join editors Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi and Coline Schupfer for the in-person launch of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, a new collection of urgent essays and interventions on the systems and technologies of surveillance, control, and violence behind oppressive border regimes around the world.
In the name of “smart” borders, states like the U.K., the U.S., and Israel have increasingly turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory deployed against the Global South, across borderlands, routes of migration, and within their own borders. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centres, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorise and control human beings and their movement. These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence from organisers, scholars, and journalists such as Harsha Walia, Ruha Benjamin, Marwa Fatafta, Arun Kundnani and many more shed light on this threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it.
MÓNICA G. MORENO FIGUEROA (Chair) is a Black-mestiza, Mexican-British, woman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge. Her research focusses on the intersectional lived experience of ‘race’ and racism in Mexico and Latin America; antiracism and academic-based impact; feminist theory, intersectionality and racism. She is an expert in qualitative research methods, visual methodologies and thrives in interdisciplinary collaborations.
MIZUE AIZEKI is Executive Director and founder of the Surveillance Resistance Lab, and former Senior Advisor at the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and the founder and Director of the Surveillance, Tech and Immigration Project. For nearly twenty years, she has focused on ending the injustices at the intersections of the criminal and migration control systems.Her photographic work appears in, among other publications, Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016).
MATT MAHMOUDI is a lecturer, researcher, and organiser. As well as helping form the No Tech for Tyrants collective, Matt leads Amnesty International’s “Ban the Scan” campaign against facial recognition technologies from New York City to the occupied Palestinian territories. He is Affiliated Lecturer in Sociology and was the inaugural Jo Cox PhD scholar at the University of Cambridge. Alongside his forthcoming book, Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control (University of California Press), his work appears in The Sociological Review, International Political Sociology, and Digital Witness (Oxford University Press, 2020).
COLINE SCHUPFER is a human rights lawyer and consultant in intersectional justice at the Open Society Foundations. For the past ten years, she has engaged in advocacy, action research, policy work, and the development of structural legal aid projects across Europe and Asia. She previously worked and consulted for the Open Society Justice Initiative and the International Institute for Environment and Development. Coline is a member of the Global Strategic Litigation Council for Refugee Rights’ working group on legal status and lawful stay, and an advisor to the Girls Human Rights Hub. She has written for the Border Criminologies blog, Opinio Juris, and the Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law.