Brexit & the Fantasy of the Frictionless Border

Keeping the Irish border frictionless is the magic trick conjured by UK/EU negotiators to resolve Brexit's complex sovereignty issues. The rabbit in the hat is a technologized border that will maintain EU free movement logics and UK independence, as well as preserving the Good Friday Agreement. This reproduces the Irish border as a dangerous space that only a highly technologized solution can 'correct'. By exploring how the border is imagined, implemented and experienced in professional workplaces and everyday communities, this thesis shows how the life-worlds of the technologized border always disturb and resist the sovereign order.

First, I outline the powerful fantasy that technology can produce a frictionless border capable of objectively and efficiently sorting 'safe' mobilities from 'dangerous' ones (Amoore, 2016). Second, I politicize that promise, showing how even the most sophisticated border technology requires fundamental norm/deviant logics which reinscribe the sovereign order. Third, I deconstruct that promise by uncovering multiplicities within the supposedly discrete categories of 'norm' and 'deviant', showing how these multiplicities always threaten to overturn the norm/deviant hierarchy. Fourth, I activate that deconstruction empirically by critically examining the life-cycle of the technologized Irish border: (a) before the border: in technology design (borders as problematic spaces to be solved); (b) inside the border: technology implementation where new devices are tested/used/maintained by border agents; and (c) at the border: where supposed 'frictionlessness' is experienced by local populations who live beside and cross it regularly.

I am interested in how that the fantasy is unravelled throughout its life-cycle: when constructed by technology designers, when implemented by border agents, and when experienced by those crossing it regularly. Because it is constituted by a norm-deviant binary, the technologized border reproduces an anachronistic imaginary of UK/EU sovereignty which masks inherent complexity, messiness and contingency (Hansen & Nissenbaum, 2009). Brexit offers a live scenario to critically explore how this fantasy masks the reproduction of new and more pernicious norm/deviant binaries.
Research Methods
Building from the seminal insights of John Law (2004) and Weber (2016), this thesis develops a methodological framework of queer material-semiotics to critically explore the 'intricate socio-technical realities' (Acuto & Curtis, 2014) intertwining human/non-human actors at key border sites.
Sites/Participants
Before the Border: constructing the Brexit Border
Through interviews with UK Border Force design partners, Accenture and thinktank, Reform, I examine how deviance is designed into technology policy. Second, through participant observation at IBMATA, I evaluate the relational networks between sovereign agencies and border technologists. Third, I ask how norm-deviance is designed into fingerprint scanners (Integrated Biometrics) and biometric software (Fujitsu UK). Fourth, given the significance of the UK's AI proposals (Gov.uk, 2018), I will conduct an ethnography at border AI designer SKU Chain.

Through interviews with border agents, I evaluate the 'professional unease' (Bigo, 2002) they experience when using technologies to 'sift' risky mobilities. How do HMRC/Irish Revenue agents operationalise technologies to sort 'safe' goods and people? How does technology succeed/fail in enabling the UK/Irish Border Forces to identify problematic mobilities? What border anxieties are managed by An Garda Siochana and the PSNI?

At the Border
To understand the way users experience the technologized border, I will conduct a series of ethnographies, with business, agri-food, cross-border commuters and arts organisations.