Infrastructuring the Digital Border: Surveillance, Political Subjectivization, and the Struggle against the Border-Industrial Complex

Abstract

Digital border infrastructures are commonly criticized for violating migrants' rights through intrusive surveillance and automated decision-making. This essay argues that such critiques remain fundamentally limited. The problem is not that border technologies are misused, but that the inherently violent and exclusionary logic of borders has become fused with techno-solutionist promises and transformed into a profitable business model. Rather than merely governing migration, digital border infrastructures produce the very conditions that legitimize their continuous expansion. Bringing together critical migration studies, science and technology studies, media and communication studies, and reflections from migrant solidarity activism, the essay conceptualizes digital border infrastructure as simultaneously material, discursive, and economic. It argues that infrastructures not only reorganize practices of bordering but also shape the production of visibility, knowledge, and political subjectivities. Securitized representations of migration are therefore not external narratives about the border; they are embedded in the infrastructures through which migration is governed and become part of a self-reinforcing cycle of border militarization. Building on this critique, the essay questions political strategies centered on human rights, counter-surveillance, or the production of visibility. Instead, it proposes shifting attention toward the digital border infrastructure itself and its material entanglements with policing and warfare. Such a perspective opens possibilities for reformulating border abolitionist politics beyond migration and toward broader struggles against militarization and surveillance.

Acknowledgement

This paper forms part of a broader collaborative initiative among various Global Media Journal editions. Parallel papers address a shared theme from the perspective of each national edition. ‘Media and Borders’ was selected for the Summer 2026 collaboration. Additional contributions are provided by the Indian edition and the Turkish edition.