Securing the Future: Border Security Innovation, Preemption, and the Problem of Critique in Neoliberal (Dis)Orders

Critical border security scholarship has increasingly come to understand border security technologies as non-linear outcomes of ongoing relationships between human and nonhuman actors within heterogeneous networks. Paradoxically, this relational view is replicated within the (border) security sector itself: since the beginning of the War on Terror, security authorities in the Western world have defined the world as composed of dynamic volatilities within more-than-human relations, where a single change may trigger cascading risks across the system, thereby necessitating ubiquitous and permanent surveillance to detect potential anomalies. In light of this ontological overlap, this dissertation asks how border security innovation can be theorised as preemption and what the implications of this are for critical theorising, taking EU border security research and development projects as its case study.

Drawing on a historical materialist sensibility, this dissertation proposes investigating the border security–critique nexus in relation to the organisation of production. It conceptualises the economic crises of the 1970s as generating a fantasy of ontological restructuring, in which life came to be understood as far-from-equilibrium to overcome the economic and ecological limits associated with industrial production under Fordist–Keynesian welfare regimes. I demonstrate that this shift has unfolded through three paradigms of emerging flexible capital accumulation: financialization, product modularisation, and ecologization. Accordingly, I conceptualise preemption as composed of speculative, modular, and ecological risk management rationalities, all oriented toward protecting capitalist flows from potential disruptions.

Drawing on document analysis, interviews, and field observations, I demonstrate empirically that across all three rationalities, border security innovation enacts flexible capital accumulation simultaneously as both the cause of and the solution to emerging risks, securing the socio-ecological reproduction of capitalism. This process operates through a plastic ontology of life, in which correlative reason displaces causal inquiry into why risks arise, instead promoting volatility management, data-driven surveillance, and technological sensing as dominant modes of governance. Finally, I demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that these developments depend on the disciplining of labour and reproduce racialised and colonial histories of domination.

This analysis shows that reliance on relational ontologies emphasising fluidity, multiplicity, instability, and dynamicity, despite their critical promise, entails a dangerous side effect: by enacting critique as disruption, such approaches often reproduce regimes of flexible capital accumulation and remain entangled with the security sector’s capitalisation on relationality. I therefore call for an understanding of reality as simultaneously structured and emergent to re-centre critique on the structural violence of capitalism.