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This month The Border Chronicle is focusing on a series on the climate crisis, displacement, and borders, and today’s podcast is a continuation of that. I am happy to be joined by insightful researcher Nathan Akehurst and by Petra Molnar, an anthropologist, lawyer, and top expert on border technology. Petra is also the associate director of the Refugee Law Lab, and she helps run the Migration Tech Monitor.
Our discussion looks at the border, the border-industrial complex, and all the technologies in development (like robotic dogs) in the face of the intensifying climate crisis. Petra draws from the extensive research she has done for her forthcoming book, Artificial Borders: AI, Surveillance, and Border Tech Experiments, and Nathan brings analysis from the paper “Border Violence and Security in a Warming World,” for which he was the principal author (I was a coauthor, and we are publishing the paper below).
In today’s discussion, we identify climate displacement and increasing border enforcement as two growing trends. But Petra and Nathan also begin to imagine different ways out of the crisis. In many ways this continues a compelling discussion we had last week with several experts and readers on this very subject.
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Border Violence and Security in a Warming World
By Nathan Akehurst with Mark Akkerman, Nick Buxton, and Todd Miller
In the mid-2000s, a security corporation ran an advert claiming that their thermal imaging technology would “have your back in Baghdad or Baton Rouge”, illustrated with an Army gunship and police helicopter. Geographer Stephen Graham references the image in a comprehensive analysis of how the US’ overseas wars of the early 2000s fostered simultaneous domestic and international securitization. New military technologies were developed in war, sold as battle-tested to other states, used to project force through military and border expansion, and deployed at home against suspect populations in the context of state-driven domestic security paranoia. This nexus is fundamental to the contemporary development of borders in the US and beyond. It has also provided the US, and more broadly the Global North, with a set of pre-existing strategies to pursue against new threats; and disincentivized considering alternatives.
Deepak Bhargava’s “Statue of Liberty” plan, which this paper responds to, is a bold vision to reset migration policy and reform borders. Attempts at structural border reform first necessitate clearly understanding what borders are, and which actors determine them. Borders are broadly understood as linear geographical divisions bounded by entry and exit checks and a system of diminished rights and entitlements for non-citizens in a territory. Yet today, the Global North’s borders arrange life deep inside and outside the countries they supposedly guard and comprise multiple complex systems driven by state and private actors which track or stop movement and make migrants expendable or exploitable. These can be roughly grouped into:
· Infrastructure to prevent and control movement by force; in which traditional technologies such as barbed wire and weaponry have been augmented by innovations like “smart walls”, autonomous detection and monitoring systems (including drones) and sound cannons.
· Expanded powers and funding for militarized police and border forces including programs to enforce border controls in everyday settings like communities and workplaces, vast networks of detention jails, and deportation infrastructure.
· Lawfare; including the denial of legal support and basic rights to asylum seekers and the criminalization of everyday citizens – from those who rescue migrants to demands that doctors check the migration status of their patients.
· Surveillance, data extraction, and biometric technologies deployed not only at borders but often against the general population with the apparent aim of migrant surveillance.
· International structures and alliances that outsource border management and infrastructure to third countries, helping to drive down human rights standards, such as the US-Mexico Merida Initiative (renamed the Bicentennial Framework in 2021.
The scale and scope of the new border is vast and evolving. As states begin reacting to climate impacts, the border has formed part of their arsenal with which to do so. A stark example of this is the widely documented horsewhipping of Haitians in Texas , many fleeing extreme weather. Climate impacts in the ‘dry’ zone of Central America are currently largely driving internal displacement, but has also led to more international migration. The current and potential impact of climate change on already fragile political conditions will rarely be easy to track or measure. Given the lack of available resources for supporting countries to adapt to climate change, militarized borders is often the default response to climate-linked displacement.
Border expansion as the basis of a hostile response to climate-linked movement is an extension of the border’s already expansive role in public life. It aims to deter migrants through brutality; a strategy that does not work, but does increase lethality and raise the question; how much death are policymakers comfortable with?
It structures politics around fear of outsiders; both feeding that fear and acting as proof of political action, whilst embedding a national security narrative at the heart of all policy. It blocks movement that governments do not desire while speeding up movement that they do, from “smart” VIP lanes to US border posts at trade ports across the world - which is already all but borderless for extractive industry. It provides a testbed for breaches of human rights against vulnerable people. It forms part of an increasingly complex game of bargaining between states, dominated by the Global North’s border drive. Moreover, the global border apparatus provides growing and lucrative markets, as well as a forum for exchanging ideas, between states and the arms, technology, logistics, consultancy and other industries. This is a nexus of institutions that receives information about the world and processes it in terms of foreign threats that require constantly upgraded “defenses,” that now includes walls, armed agents, and incessant surveillance. In a climate context, such thinking is particularly deadly.
The “military-industrial complex” term coined by Eisenhower in the 1960s has been recently bolstered by a plethora of related terms familiar in activist movements; the “prison-industrial complex”, “border-industrial complex”, and so on. They describe the shared nest of state, commercial, and political interests around...
