The technopolitics of border security R&D: Shaping the EU’s border in the Security Research Programme

Abstract

Technologies are predominantly understood as ‘solutions’ for policy problems in EU border control. This has prompted increased political attention to research and development (R&D) of ‘innovative’ security technologies. The European Commission has continuously increased its spending on the development of security devices in the Security Research Programme; at the same time, border security institutions such as Frontex or eu-LISA have worked to amplify their influence on shaping security research in the EU’s Research Framework Programmes. Against this backdrop, this article develops the argument that R&D is a political practice of ‘making’ and governing the border through its entanglement with the politics of border security in the EU. By conceptualizing R&D as ‘borderwork’, the article interrogates how practices of security R&D inscribes specific logics into EU border security and control. In doing this, it also problematizes how R&D locks in exclusionary dichotomies and categorizations of mobilities through privileging security actors in the process. Based on qualitative interviews, the article provides an in-depth analysis of political processes through which R&D programmes and projects materialize at policymaking, implementing and operational levels. Through this, the article explores comprehensively how political logics of bordering are constantly shaping and simultaneously renegotiated in R&D.

Keywords

Borders European Union mobility research and development security technology

Introduction

Controlling mobility at the EU’s borders is increasingly shaped by an idea of ‘techno-solutionism’ (Trauttmansdorff, 2023) where policy controversies and problems are sought to be solved by the application of ‘innovative’ technologies. This line of thinking has stimulated investment in the research and development (R&D) of security technologies by the EU. Within its large-scale Research Framework Programme (FP) Horizon 2020 (H2020), from 2014 to 2020 the EU invested more than €1.4 billion in 340 funded projects on security (European Commission, 2022a), €260 million of which went into specific projects on border security.¹ Border security also remains one of the focal points in the EU’s security R&D programme ‘Civil Security for Society’ under the umbrella of the Horizon Europe FP until 2027. The ‘technopolitics of security’ (Müller and Richmond, 2023) at the border are therefore increasingly shaped at multiple levels of the Security Research Programme (SRP),² both in terms of programmatic decisions and in concrete technological development. This article thus creates an understanding of R&D as a set of political practices through which technological devices are not merely developed, but rather, perceptions and decisions of security and the border are shaped (Bourne et al., 2015; Martin-Mazé and Perret, 2021).

The main argument of this article is that R&D is entangled with political structures and conceptualizations of borders, making it a vital element in shaping how security and control are produced at the border. Ontological assumptions of borders and security are reproduced and renegotiated in multiple practices of R&D, since R&D in the specific form of the FPs emerges from these assumptions. Hence, this article builds upon academic debates that have engaged with the role of technologies at the borders and the specific political implications of R&D. Previous work has interrogated how understandings and decisions of security have been inscribed into technology development at both programmatic levels and R&D projects (Bourne et al., 2015; Martin-Mazé and Perret, 2021; Valkenburg and van der Ploeg, 2015). I contribute to these literatures by drawing on the concept of ‘borderwork’ (Frowd, 2018; Rumford, 2013; Vaughan-Williams, 2008) through which I understand R&D as productive of the border. R&D as borderwork consists of a dispersed set of practices that reaches from the larger scale of setting up the framework in the EU’s Research Framework Programmes to the specific tasks of developing a single device in the course of a project. Moreover, in this article R&D is understood not only to engender the border in a material, infrastructural sense, but especially as productive of practices and logics of governing (Rose, 1999; Yuval-Davis et al., 2019).

R&D as being productive of logics of governing mobilities is a result of different knowledges and forms of epistemic work carried out by a variety of institutions. As border control has emerged as a comprehensively technologized field, for example through databases and registration infrastructures (such as the Schengen Information System or the Visa Information System) or surveillance systems (particularly EUROSUR), security practitioners perceive a political imperative to constantly improve and further develop infrastructures of security and control and promote technologies as solutions for policy problems (Bellanova and Glouftsios, 2022; Jeandesboz, 2016; 2017). Consequentially, border security institutions have increased their efforts in participating in the FPs through structural changes and specific administrative practices. For instance, the European Commission as well as two powerful EU executive agencies in the field of border control, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) and the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (eu-LISA), have established respective units for research and innovation that work specifically on technology development and technological innovations within the FPs and have established modes of mutual cooperation (Martins, 2023). This article thus seeks to grapple with ‘broader legislative, political, and administrative transformations in the European bureaucratic order’ (Pelizza, 2020: 263) that are engendered through the techno-solutionist approaches of R&D. This approach also follows up on Müller and Richmond (2023), who state that technology development ‘reflects the priorities and inequalities of the societies within which it occurs and the interests of state hierarchies and ruling elites’ in order to understand how these political structures not only produce security, but problematize how security itself is produced in terms of the underlying power relations.

However, the article also underlines the challenges to the techno-solutionist underpinnings of R&D through the lack of implementation of R&D projects in operational contexts (Boswell and Besse, 2023; Jaffe and Pilo’, 2023). Projects often remain at the stage of prototypes that, for various reasons, are not implemented by border polices. This article addresses this issue by showing that R&D as borderwork cannot be understood only through its material outcomes. Rather, following Pelizza’s (2020: 264) statement that ‘[w]hile some procedures remain at the stage of proposals, they nonetheless suggest how things could be otherwise’, through being interwoven with ideas of bordering, R&D produces knowledges and imaginaries of possible bordering practices. This means that R&D is seen as a political programme that realizes imaginaries of contemporary and future bordering infrastructures through technological development (Jasanoff, 2015; Jasanoff and Kim, 2009). These imaginaries are often deeply entangled with power relations and logics of control at the border that (re)produce exclusionary and violent structures, where R&D locks in these through its institutional politics and practices (De Genova, 2013; Isakjee et al., 2020; Jones, 2017; Pallister-Wilkins, 2022). Moreover, as this article shows, R&D engenders specific political and administrative settings which shape the politics of knowledge and expertise in the field of border security by privileging specific forms of expertise that are formative for the border (Boswell, 2008; Scheel, 2022; Scheel and Ustek-Spilda, 2019). In doing this, my argument is that by understanding R&D through its characteristic as set of political practices, rather than its material products, we can better understand emerging forms of bordering.

The article starts with a conceptual discussion of how R&D can be understood as a form of ‘borderwork’ that shapes how the EU governs its external borders, followed up by outlining methodological challenges. In the ensuing empirical analysis, I delve into three levels where the borderwork of R&D is performed in different aspects. Here, I engage with the making of research programmes within the Commission, the shaping of programmes and projects through security knowledge performed by the agencies, and how the specialized, dispersed practices of R&D in the projects are related to the political objectives of bordering the EU through connecting the work in the ‘laboratories’ (Bourne et al., 2015) with the work at the political and administrative level. Through this analysis, my research addresses a crucial gap of understanding the political processes that are not only ongoing inside of laboratories, but how these are enmeshed with larger structural decisions and thus reciprocally shape the trajectories of technology development in the FPs. In doing this, my work contributes to the debates on border technologies by centring political processes attached to technology development as crucial factors in the bigger ‘infrastructuring’ of the technological borders (Dijstelbloem, 2021).

Understanding R&D as borderwork of security and control

R&D consists of various heterogenous actions that encompass administrative practices of funding as well as political practices of negotiating working programmes and everyday research practices within the laboratory (Bourne et al., 2015; Grünenberg, 2020). My conceptualization thus follows up on the work that understands technology development as a ‘translation’ of security, where political problem formulations are rendered into concrete sociotechnical devices (Bourne et al., 2015; Valkenburg and van der Ploeg, 2015). However, I conceive R&D more broadly as being ‘aimed to design devices that would materialize borders in specific ways’ (Martin-Mazé and Perret, 2021: 21). R&D as a set of heterogeneous practices is thus understood to contribute to the emergence of a specific form of the border that entangles logics of security and control with the structure of the border (Vaughan-Williams, 2008; Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). In this sense, the border is an instrument of controlling mobility (Nail, 2016) that is expanded and extended through R&D.

R&D constitutes logics of security and control in the technical decisions, such as design and functionality, that shape practices of controlling mobilities. To this end, I understand the border as not only a material infrastructure, but ‘bordering’ as one of ‘the ideals or principles that should guide the exercise of authority’ (Rose, 1999: 26). Borders are thus both physical structures and parts of imaginaries of political and societal orders. In this understanding, the border is an instrument of bifurcation, filtering and deterrence of mobility (Nail, 2016). Logics of bordering address ‘not only about who moves and who does not, but also about who controls whose movements’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 4). Bordering, in this sense, is also co-constitutive with the construction of mobility categories as it comprises ‘the political, legal and racialising mechanisms through which some people are labelled and governed’ (Tazzioli, 2020: 2).

As one of the mechanisms that governs and therefore constitutes these ontologies of mobility, I conceptualize R&D as a form of ‘borderwork’ (Frowd, 2018; Rumford, 2013; Vaughan-Williams, 2008) through which the border is produced in different spaces, such as programme committees and project consortia. Borderwork ‘alerts us to the wide variety of bordering activity that may exist, the diversity of interests at work in this bordering, and the varied spaces within which this activity occurs’ (Rumford, 2013: 172). Understood through the ‘processual turn’, R&D engenders forms of control in spaces that both are territorially away from geographical borders as well as not traditionally linked to practices of border control (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019: 19). These forms of borderwork ‘are not simply discrete or isolated forms of action, but rather focal points in diffuse networks that pull together myriad policy actors, territorial locations, forms of expertise, and institutional competition’ (Frowd, 2018, 30). Thereby we can also understand how R&D engenders new forms of institutional powers and structures (Pelizza, 2020) through logics of bordering and control spilling over to other policy areas, what Philippe Frowd (2022) succinctly describes as ‘borderwork creep’. Moreover, R&D becomes a means of exerting control at borders while being spatially dispersed, rendering it into a form of ‘remote control’ (FitzGerald, 2020). The conceptualization of R&D as ‘borderwork’ thus allows to understand how through politically framing R&D as a crucial element of border control by means of agenda setting and funding, EU institutions further centralize the means of mobility control (Torpey, 2018: 5).

Most importantly, R&D is understood to be productive of specific rationalities of governing the border (Rose, 1999). Through the borderwork of R&D, security and control are intertwined with the everyday practices and politics of security, rather than being framed as exceptional (Neal, 2019; Nyman, 2021; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016). This leads to a constant renegotiation of what constitutes (in)security and threats at the border (Huysmans, 2006; Vaughan-Williams, 2021). In this sense, R&D is not exclusively defined through the material outcomes in terms of technological devices, but rather through its entanglement of material developments and the reproduction and renegotiation of political ideas about mobility control. This conceptualization allows for an understanding of the productive character of R&D in bordering, even though technologies are possibly failing to reach their envisioned effect (Boswell and Besse, 2023; Jaffe and Pilo’, 2023).

These knowledges and imaginaries revolve mainly about questions of what constitutes threats and insecurities and which modes of security and control need to be enabled. In terms of mobility, security and control rests upon categorizations of people on the move that deem them as either ‘risky’ and ‘threatening’ or as ‘bona fide’ travellers whose mobility should be fostered (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018; Franko, 2011; Tazzioli, 2020). These categorizations are inextricably linked to the border as a device of allowing and prohibiting movement at the same time (Nail, 2016). How these categories of mobility are constructed as security risks is thus ‘a political practice, and not an essential state’ (McCluskey, 2019: 11). Borderwork as a political practice constructs categories of mobilities that are desired or undesired, facilitated or obstructed, based on framing those as illegal, risky and insecure (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018; Franko, 2020; Huysmans, 2006; Stachowitsch and Sachseder, 2019). Logics of security and control engender a juxtaposition of working to enable and obstruct mobility. Through this, they create a rationale to enable modes of ‘knowing’ and ‘predicting’ movement in order to be able to facilitate or deter mobilities (Aradau and Blanke, 2017; Jeandesboz, 2021) As Walters (2006: 192) states, the logic of control at the border ‘filters out, and constitutes a risky, excluded remainder’.

Control is thus a main factor in ‘making’ (Tazzioli, 2020) migration as a form of mobility that is articulated to be governed through logics of filtering and simultaneously including and excluding. In this, the simultaneous enabling and obstructing of movement in the logics of security and control produces ‘different subjects whose movements are to be monitored, facilitated, restricted, or inhibited’ (M’charek et al., 2014: 470). Academic debates have described these modes of producing mobility categories as entangled with racializing and exclusionary power relations (Achilleos-Sarll et al., 2023; Tazzioli, 2021). Understanding R&D as a borderwork shaped by logics of security and control that simultaneously facilitate and obstruct certain forms of movement thus means to understand practices of R&D as (re)productive of racialized and exclusionary power relations. This also challenges the ‘neutrality’ of techno-solutionism, but rather regards the development of technologies as shaped by sociopolitical power relations.

Methodologies in a dispersed field

One major challenge that arose while I was doing the research for this article was the dispersed nature of the apparatus of R&D in border security. My objective thus was interrogating the structures that ‘both constitute and materialize out of highly mediated relations and the near absence of connections between people’ (Feldman, 2012: 6). In this sense, practices of mediating these relations are central research objects, for example in terms of how different forms of knowledge are transformed into common documents. It also means to account for the various material and institutional realities of actors involved in the borderwork of R&D and to find ways to ‘participate in the enactment of those realities’ (Law, 2004). In order to uncover how entanglements of bordering and R&D engender practices of border security and control, my research thus focused on creating knowledge and data about interactions between key actors, their everyday procedures and their understandings of their labour.

Interviewing enabled me to ‘learn about places we have not been and could not go and about settings in which we have not lived’ (Weiss, 1995: 10); to re-enact the realities of those involved in the borderwork of R&D, I draw on interview material of 17 interviews³ that I conducted between spring 2020 and summer 2021. I spoke to public officials as well as researchers involved in projects that were funded under the FPs. The interviewees were selected following Fujii (2018) through an iterative method in which criteria for selecting interviewees were adapted throughout the research process, for example in terms of professional ranks, institutional affiliation or engagement with specific sets of practices in the R&D process. Moreover, I draw on the observation of a small number of online events, such as meetings between EU agencies, researchers and industry actors or project presentations. In addition to this data collection, I analysed documents such as strategies and working programmes in order to interrogate the imaginaries and political propositions therein. Data analysis occurred through coding inspired by Charmaz’s (2006) approach, where I developed initial codes in every document or interview and then developed larger categories – such as practices of R&D, political imaginaries or power relations – that served as a framework for the analysis

Researching a dispersed security apparatus, which is simultaneously transparent regarding R&D but sometimes more secretive regarding border security, created challenges both in terms of access to sites as well as in specific challenges about positionality. In terms of access, the fragmented nature of the field meant also to face different sorts of scrutiny in terms of institutions’ openness to research (Dijstelbloem and Pelizza, 2020; Kalir et al., 2019). This reflected, for example, in terms of interview access and in developing strategies to circumvent possible obstructions of access. To this end, I identified a heterogeneous set of actors, particularly in the security realm, to get access to different forms of knowledge. In doing this, I often relied on informal methods to identify and contact research participants (Frowd, 2018). In terms of my own positionality, researchers regarded me as a colleague and public officials often had a normative understanding of a researcher’s work, therefore they were not always expecting critical engagement. However, as Marieke De Goede (2020: 112) reminds us, there are ways of how ‘critical practice can be leveraged through “thinking with” professionals and practitioners – rather than denouncing them’. While through my work I sought to challenge modes of producing insecurity (Aradau et al., 2015), this meant to carefully approach the discursive positions of professionals and practitioners and how these produce R&D as modes of security. Furthermore, it also meant to detach the individuals from the structures they were working and critiquing these structures while reflecting about the ethical handling of the individual research participants (Grassiani, 2020). Through this approach, I shed light on power structures by simultaneously attempting to critique those by understanding their more mundane workings.

The borderwork of R&D – ‘making’ programmes, developing technologies

The making of R&D as borderwork starts in a variety of strategic decisions and visions at the EU level. The ‘Security Union Strategy’ which represents the major strategic document for the interior security policy of the EU highlights the role of R&D for, as the Commission states, ‘supporting’ the security policy of the bloc (European Commission, 2020). Similarly, a staff document of the Commission envisions R&D as ‘enhancing’ security policy (European Commission, 2021a). The documents and strategic endeavours are one departure point of unpacking how R&D constitutes borderwork and how it is shaped by specific power relations at the border. The conceptualization of R&D as practice in security and control thus shows the aforementioned ‘borderwork creep’ (Frowd, 2022) where border security actors attempt to exert their powers of bordering through an expanding set of practices (Martins et al., 2022).

The border is shaped by an entanglement of power relations: it comprises powers of enabling or obstructing mobility, of forms of controlling and defining threats and insecurities as well as of including and excluding (Basaran, 2008; Brambilla, 2015). These power relations manifest in myriad forms of borderwork by actors across the EU – reaching from decisions of granting or prohibiting entry to the design of large-scale systems in the field of border control (Bigo, 2014; Glouftsios, 2019). R&D as borderwork thus needs to be understood against the backdrop of institutional powers in agenda setting, but also embedded in broader societal power relations in terms of inclusion and exclusion. In order to make sense of R&D as borderwork, it is thus crucial to unpack how actors use their specific positionalities in shaping the research programmes and projects. This comprises policymaking powers, such as by the Commission, as well as the power of decisions on insecurity and control taken by the agencies (Léonard and Kaunert, 2022). These power relations thus define who can and cannot shape R&D and thereby are a crucial prerequisite to understand the specific forms in which R&D functions as borderwork within the EU’s ‘culture of border control’ (Zaiotti, 2011).

I found R&D to be a control-driven practice, which includes security actors as well as industry actors within the projects, but excludes perspectives from people on the move, especially from migrants. Projects rarely engage with advocacy groups and NGOs, but rather give primacy to security actors and industry (Interview 1). Priorities within the programmes are thus shaped through the expertise of security actors and remain uncontested by those who are controlled (Scheel, 2022). In this sense, R&D also represents a form of ‘epistemic borderwork’ that works towards ‘shutting out perspectives that expose the injustice of the border itself’ (Davies et al., 2023). This is an important analytical note to make, as it underpins how R&D is currently used as a tool to produce a specific border and obstructs the contestation of borders, thereby locking in existing power relations.

In the following sections, I unpack the borderwork of R&D at three distinct levels that encompass agenda setting, knowledge production and technological development. I start with the level of the Commission, where I argue the structuring of R&D in border security takes place in the formulation of concrete working programmes and calls. I then expand my analysis to the powerful security actors, especially the EU’s executive agencies, and address the modes of how they shape these programmes, but also the more manual labour within the projects through their specific positionality. The final level of analysis is the borderwork of R&D within the projects, in which the entanglements of policy, security knowledge and everyday labour of R&D are uncovered. This approach allows me to follow the political visions, knowledges and practices at different levels of R&D and give insight into the multiplicity of political processes and structures that the field of R&D engenders.

R&D as policy ‘solution’: The borderwork of the European Commission

At the core of the SRP lies the formulation of working programmes and calls for projects which are published biannually and set the agenda for the FPs by providing specific objectives of possibly funded projects. These calls define objectives for project proposals and thus envision the technologies resulting from R&D. They are perceived as instrumental in shaping up the projects, as projects are oriented along the guidelines of the calls from the proposal stage (Interviews 1, 12–17). In consequence, the calls become ‘fundamental ‘ordering principle[s]’ (Shore and Wright, 2011: 3) that organize both material setups of consortia as well as the ideas that shape R&D projects. The first step in understanding how R&D functions as borderwork is thus to unpack how it is a political practice that is entangled with policy visions and underpinned by power relations.

Within the European Commission, the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG Home) with its unit on security research (officially named ‘Innovation and Industry for Security’, hereafter Security Research Unit), is formally the major actor in shaping and making the programmes, as it drafts the working programmes and research calls. The unit is supported by the Research Executive Agency (REA) in more administrative and technical decisions, such as funding decisions, communicating with projects and disseminating results (Interview 2). The Security Research Unit and REA thus share responsibilities in maintaining the ‘everyday’ (Nyman, 2021) of the SRP and represent the Commission’s role in R&D towards other actors. The borderwork that these two entities perform in formulating and maintaining the programmes is, however, shaped by interactions and entanglements with policymaking and implementing units.

The special role attributed to the Security Research Unit emerges through its close ties with the policy-related units within the Commission, particularly the units that deal with the operationalization of multiple technological infrastructures, such as the SIS, the Entry–Exit System or EURODAC (Interview 3). Essentially, as one EU official described, ‘by moving the unit of innovation towards the policy-making unit there is the expectation, and that is happening, that the research needs to keep contact with the policymaking in order to know what issues you try to solve’ (Interview 4). The borderwork of the Security Research Unit is thus foremost seen in translating ‘needs’ into ‘solutions’ (Martins and Jumbert, 2022). In doing this, the envisioned solutions are mutually productive of the bordering practices conceptualized in the policies.

However, this solutionist perspective is challenged as policy units do not regard the SRP as necessarily contributing to their operational work. Scepticism arises mostly through the problem of limited operationalization, which is argued to result from R&D not fitting requirements in terms of availability and usability, but also in the lack of standards for technologies used at the border (Interviews 5, 6). One EU official argued that the work of research units more broadly ‘should be connected, not disconnected to the operational activity to see if it’s useful, what you do, to see if the solution that you propose fits really the operational purposes at the EU external borders’ (Interview 6). In doing this, operational units strengthen their position by claiming that their knowledge is a decisive factor of ‘failure’ and ‘success’ (Boswell and Besse, 2023).

This controversy on usability fosters an even closer connection between the Security Research Unit and the policy units within the Commission, as there is an active process of knowledge gathering to the end of strengthening the role of R&D. One EU official outlined the working procedure in terms of drafting the programme as follows:

They formally ask what the policy views are, what do you try to achieve in the next few years and on a regular basis they ask what the issues are, what is the status of the issues, where we have feedback coming from the member states and from the agencies. (Interview 4)

As a consequence, the perceived ‘problems’ that are sought to be ‘solved’ in the SRP represent the challenges of implementing policies. This reifies interpretations of threats, risks and insecurities, but also reiterates objectives that are prevalent within policies and among policymakers. Policymakers formulate visions on common themes, for example for improved means of identification of individuals crossing the border or accelerated mobility for travellers deemed as ‘safe’ (Interviews 4, 7). As one EU official outlined, one major goal of the policies is to prevent certain threats to reach us and to know more about the identity of the people that are not part of the Union, in order to ensure that the persons that are crossing the border are exactly the persons that are presenting themselves at the border. (Interview 7) Policy visions thus often perpetuate the understanding of non-EU mobilities as a threat while simultaneously promoting desired forms of mobility (Franko, 2011). In this sense, the borderwork of the Commission in translating these policy visions into research calls consists of ‘continually mak[ing] decisions about inclusion and exclusion’ (Frowd, 2018: 32).

The translation of the ‘requirements’ into calls to engender prevalent issues such as the improvement of biometric detection technologies is a common theme throughout the working programmes, with the most recent Horizon Europe programme formulating ‘robust biometrics technologies that could be used for recognition (identification and verification) of people crossing external EU borders, demonstrating a clear advancement beyond the current state-of-the-art’ (European Commission, 2022b) as a central objective. Similarly, facilitated mobility for ‘the travel of bona-fide and genuine passengers and simultaneously to safeguard high level of security’ (European Commission, 2013) is formulated as objective, reiterating the distinction between ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’ forms of travelling.

The borderwork within the Commission, particularly performed by the Security Research Unit, is thus a main element of how specific logics of border security and control are rendered into ‘ordering principles’ (Shore and Wright, 2011). This shows how policies are a powerful tool in defining the design and function of technologies and how R&D also reifies powers and agency of agenda setting in border security. The solutionist approach in making the working programmes furthermore underscores how R&D is regarded as an instrument of implementing policies or aspects thereof.

(Re)producing security and control: The borderwork of the agencies

While the policy units within the Commission have an important role in defining the role of R&D in policy implementation, they are described as having no operational responsibility (EU Official 5). In consequence, the actors involved in the larger borderwork assemblage of the EU, such as Frontex and eu-LISA, are seen as central actors holding the specific operational knowledge (Frowd, 2018; Martins, 2023; Vaughan-Williams, 2008). The agencies thus assume a special function in the formulation of the FPs through being able to define actual operational requirements.

We are lucky to be a pioneer for other agencies with regards to Horizon because as I mentioned we are the senior user, so we are discussing with DG Home, we provide them with input, feedback and recommendations for themes and topics of research. (Interview 8)

To this end, within the agencies, units that deal especially with questions of R&D have been established. While these units do not have formal competences to draft research programmes, they serve as important interlocutors between operational units within their respective agencies and the Security Research Unit within the Commission. In this sense, within the respective agencies they take on the one hand a similar role to the Security Research Unit; however, on the other hand, they produce specific knowledge products to underline their efforts. They are therefore important vehicles in establishing agencies as ‘vanguards’ (Trauttmansdorff and Felt, 2023) in a sense that specific ideas about bordering, security and control are reflected and privileged in the working programmes. The important role of the research units within the agencies has been further formalized through the signing of ‘Terms of Reference’ (TOR) documents between DG Home and Frontex or eu-LISA respectively. These documents were implemented with the idea of precisely outlining the role that the agencies would assume in the FPs. Both agencies, by virtue of the TORs, are thus involved not only in the programming and providing inputs on political priorities in the working programmes, but would also be involved in the review and selection of project proposals as well as in communicating with projects and disseminating results among national border polices (European Commission and eu-LISA, 2021; European Commission and Frontex, 2020). In terms of shaping the programmes, one agency official mentioned that ‘the idea is that we will also try to put forward proposals for topics for calls within the Horizon Europe framework that are specifically relevant’ (Interview 9). Being the primary actors in a ‘culture’ of security and control (Zaiotti, 2011), agencies shaping the calls thus significantly contribute to locking in these logics into bordering through R&D.

The powers of agencies in forming R&D thus work in a twofold fashion. On the one hand, operational units, similar to the Commission, are fundamental in the structural design of R&D as they describe their role as ‘first, definition of requirements, definition of new concepts together, and then later the operational verification, when things are developed’ (Interview 10). How operational units envision practices of bordering garners considerable salience in the needs the research units communicate to DG Home, making this another instance where ideas of bordering are reproduced in formulating the programmes. On the other hand, through their positioning at the interface of the agencies and the Commission, the research units are rendered into powerful brokers through translating the political visions inside the agencies to the bodies drafting the working programmes (Interview 11). They do so not only by communicating those needs, but also by issuing knowledge products that underpin the agencies’ specific needs. For instance, both Frontex and eu-LISA have issued studies on the topic of artificial intelligence in border security, further increasing the salience of the topic in R&D (eu-LISA, 2020; Frontex, 2021).

That reflects in the working programmes specifically in the areas where agencies are the main operational actor, for example in terms of the border surveillance system EUROSUR (Bellanova and Duez, 2016; Jeandesboz, 2017). EUROSUR is largely managed at the interface of Frontex and member states, where it relies on a variety of technologies for the surveillance of parts of the EU’s geographical land and sea borders. However, EUROSUR is expanding the space of surveillance by including the so-called ‘pre-frontier area’ (European Union, 2013) that essentially is seen as the area where there are incidents or actions which can later on impact the external borders. So, there is no definition that it is 10 kilometres from our external borders, it’s basically even globally, which sooner or later can have impact on our external border. (Interview 10) This requirement is also found in the 2021–2022 working programme of Horizon Europe where projects are sought to ‘monitor wider areas beyond the EU external borders in order to prevent, detect and react to crime, including that crossing external borders, illegal border crossings and/or smuggling at the border regions of the EU and of the Schengen area’ (European Commission, 2021b). Through operational requirements being translated into research calls, R&D is considerably shaped by the specific knowledge security actors hold (Martins, 2023; Vogel et al., 2017). In doing this, R&D functions as a vehicle that works to the end of more expansive bordering regimes that further locks in dichotomies between different forms of desired and undesired mobilities.

Agencies thus experience an expansion of their powers in the EU’s bordering regime. Through the involvement in testing and operationalizing, agencies establish themselves as so-called ‘senior users’, meaning that they represent national border polices and control institutions. This enables specifically the research units to make decisions on which projects are deemed as useful in the operational context (Interview 8), allowing them to shape not only the programmes, but also possibly practices at the border (Bourne et al., 2015). Furthermore, through the TORs and consequentially more formalized possibilities of influencing agenda setting, the role of agencies thus is a major factor in the production of borders through R&D. The borderwork performed by the agencies comprises knowledge production as well as formulating requirements that are regarded as crucial for the operational use of technologies. Consequentially, their powers in the EU’s border control regime are further reiterated through their privileged position in agenda setting.

Materializing the programmes: Borderwork within the projects

Having shown how the FPs as well as the more detailed working programmes engender a political framework for R&D, I will now attend to the borderwork of technology development in ‘laboratories’ of projects (Bourne et al., 2015; Grünenberg, 2020). The conceptualizations of projects as ‘laboratories’ sheds light particularly on the interactions and assemblages (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) within the project work; thus projects are not understood as material infrastructures, but rather consortia can be seen as ‘staged intersections’ which ‘intentionally brought people together from diverse social worlds for the express purposes of persuasion and public adjudication’ and where the settings and configurations are usually ‘unique to each situation’ (Garrety, 1998: 403). This is a key factor, as different forms of borderwork emerge in the projects that often challenge the previsions of the working programmes. Most importantly, two actor groups are crucial within the projects: first, security actors as so-called ‘end-users’ (Interview 3), and second, industry actors as the largest recipients of funding. Both shape the projects through specific forms of knowledges. On the one hand, the inclusion of security actors in order to guarantee applicability and alignment with their requirements perpetuates logics of security and control within the projects. On the other hand, industry actors embed projects in a political economy where the results must be marketable, thus also connected to the demands of security practitioners (Hoijtink, 2014; Lemberg-Pedersen, 2013).

Logics of security and control thus shape the borderwork of R&D within the projects in twofold fashion. First, project proposals emerge in an ecosystem that is strongly shaped by working programmes and calls; one researcher describes that in writing a proposal ‘what the Commission wants, you have to see that you address point by point’ (Interview 12). This step is where ‘diverse types of technoscientific, security, and policy concerns [are] translated into the design characteristics’ (Glouftsios, 2019: 166) and defines how the design, and thus the work towards the production of the device, will reflect the political objectives set out in the calls. Second, security practitioners are made ‘experts’ (Stampnitzky, 2013) whose knowledge and experiences are privileged in terms of rendering projects ‘applicable’ to the operational sphere. Their power to shape projects results from their inclusion being mandatory within the calls (European Commission, 2021b). Their involvement occurs at multiple levels of the project, reaching from defining project goals (Interviews 13, 14) to taking the leading role in scenarios for ‘operational validation’ (Interview 15). For example, during the Andromeda project, which was funded under Horizon 2020, the developed device was tested by the Greek coastguard at the Bulgarian–Greek border during simulations of cases of irregularized forms of mobility and human trafficking (Observation 1). Particularly the testing and ‘validation’ of the projects is therefore nested within the political imaginations of risks and insecurities, further reproducing them in the labour of the project.

The labour of bordering through R&D splits into a multitude of small-scale processes that ultimately result in the developed device. However, these tasks do not merely encompass scientific and technical practices but consist of a wide array of actions that entangle the project with the wider sociopolitical context. As one project participant said, for researchers ‘the manual labour is not different, what differs is the interaction and the possibility to translate your results’ (Interview 13) relating to the collaboration with security practitioners and industry actors. This was reiterated by another project participant, who outlined the importance of having the agencies involved in projects in order to ‘ensure that the outcomes of your project are in line with their needs, because at the end, we need to contribute also to the global ecosystem, the European ecosystem of border surveillance’ (Interview 15). This shows how the everyday labour of researchers and project participants constitutes borderwork in the specific setup of the projects within the FPs.

Through both the strong alignment with the working programmes as well as the privileged role of security actors, the significance of the work is understood rather politically than through scientific progress or innovation (Interview 13). Projects aim for solutions to problems formulated in the calls. For example, one project report in the Trespass project that was funded under H2020 stated a policy objective that also was mentioned in numerous calls:

In border control this would mean minimal checks, if possible, more stringent checks if needed. To achieve this, the type of checks should be based on a situational threat assessment of each individual traveller, based on actual information on threats and vulnerabilities. (Trespass 2021: 39)

This was also reiterated by multiple project participants; for example, a member of a different consortium stated that the main motivation of that project was to ‘support and facilitate the end-users’ activities of continuous check and survey the border area’ (Interview 14), while another stated that the developed device ‘will provide a real time situational picture of the frontier and shorter-range pre-frontier area with the information provided by the sensors’ (Interview 16). However, the projects are not limited to providing solutions to predefined problems. Rather, actors within projects have the agency to

. . . propose to go sometimes even beyond, outside the lines of what is the policy. We can for example, suggest an amendment or, this is part of the research, we can propose something that says, perhaps if we could consider using the aspects, if we could expand a bit the policy, then we could get more benefits. (Interview 12)

This moreover reflects in practices such as communicating results in workshops to the Commission, the agencies, and producing policy papers that aim to inform policy decisions. Thus, the borderwork within projects does not only comprise the reiteration of logics of security and control, but rather also shapes the decisions of bordering by generating specific knowledge (Bourne et al., 2015).

While the alignment of calls, end-users and security knowledge reinforces the border as a tool of security and control, it is particularly the work packages on ethics that legitimize R&D as bordering practice. This seems like a paradox at first glance; however, I have found these practices as obfuscating problematic structures at the borders. This results from a highly reductive understanding of ethics (Leese et al., 2019) that reduces the ethics work packages to data protection issues.

Priority, of course, is given to fundamental rights and the protection of personal data, for instance, and privacy and security, they mention, and health and safety procedures that we need to follow. (Interview 15)

When questioned about ethics, the entirety of project participants interviewed pointed out data protection in terms of compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as the most pressing issue in terms of the ethics work packages. There is also a prevalent general assumption that technologies produced in EU contexts are ‘by design’ compliant to ethical standards and that ethics also comprises a market dimension to be able to sell the developed products (Observation 1). While a few projects were devoting additional effort to ethics work (Interviews 14, 17; see also Klimburg-Witjes and Huettenrauch, 2021), a majority of actors within the consortia regarded ethics and fundamental rights as a means to comply with the demands of the EU Commission rather than to deal with the societal implications of their work. This is further underpinned through some participants acknowledging that there could be discrimination, but rarely mentioning its problematic effects. Rather, also here a reductive understanding of discrimination as something to simply avoid rather than to engage with in a wider context is dominating.

It’s not smart security. I would say, it’s dumb security if you go down the discriminatory path, it’s just dumb. And unfortunately, these are practices that have been followed even in some cases. (Interview 12)

The underlying logics of the ethics work packages thus correspond to legitimizing technological practices of border control through knowledge practices (Boswell, 2008). Specifically, they promote the self-imagination of the EU as a non-discriminatory space, whereby bordering practices are framed as ‘ethical’ (Isakjee et al., 2020). In this context, ethics work as epistemic borderwork, creating a sense of legitimacy through obstructing possible challenges to the notions of technologies abiding with fundamental human rights. Issues of discrimination and exclusion have an ‘absent presence’ (M’charek et al., 2014) in a sense that they are indeed accounted for, but in a reductive fashion that does not resist violent structures, but rather reproduces them through omitting criticism and self-framings of EU technologies as ‘ethical by design’ (Andromeda Observation). This results in structures that ‘render practices of racial profiling more acceptable and less problematic when effected through technologies’ (Vukov, 2016: 91) as technologies are regarded as largely unbiased among practitioners by virtue of the ethics packages (Interviews 3, 7).

This section has shown how projects serve as ‘key site where EU policy discourse is stabilized’ (Feldman, 2012: 29). Projects do not only produce material devices designed to secure and control, but they reiterate and lock in political structures set out in the programmes through their labour. They further privilege security knowledge and exclude possible contestation of dominant logics through their inner power structures. The entanglement of constructions of threat and insecurity with the manual labour of R&D thus produces visions and materialities of borders in a specific fashion. Therefore, projects, even if they remain prototypes, create visions of possibilities in bordering and thus are a principal factor in the knowledge regime of border security and control.

Conclusion

Bourne et al. (2015: 321) rightfully state that ‘we cannot fully understand . . . the operation of security technologies without understanding how such devices were funded, designed, crafted, adapted, and tested before being deployed’. This article has combined an analysis of how R&D in the EU is shaped through political ideas of the border and how projects in those frameworks produce borders and reify logics of security and control. It has shown that R&D comprises a variety of practices from a multiplicity of actors that are mediated (Feldman, 2011) through the FPs and reassembled in the laboratories of the projects. In mediating through the making of the programmes, logics of bordering, security and control are entangled with practices of R&D and render those into political instruments to govern migration and mobility at the border. By expanding our understanding of how borders are produced temporally and spatially detached from the geographical border, the main contribution of this article therefore lies in showing how specific borders are produced through various forms of labour and how bordering encompasses a constantly expanding set of practices (Frowd, 2022). In doing this, my work contributes not only to more specific ongoing debates on the role of technology in bordering, but also in broader debates on how borders are engendered, and understanding that how they take violent, racializing shapes is a result of political processes. This article thus challenges the ‘solutionist’ framing of R&D by critiquing how processes of technology development are processes of bordering.

At the same time, R&D projects show what is feasible at the border to reach specific policy objectives and how they are reshaped. While I have shown how borders are negotiated and produced in the FPs, I have only briefly addressed the implementation into the ‘operational’ sphere, which is not always a clear-cut process, and often projects remain at the stages of proposals (Pelizza, 2020: 264). R&D thus does not necessarily make the border exclusively through producing material technologies that are used to ‘secure’ and control, but rather, through producing ideas that shape political visions and endeavours of mobility control. In this sense, R&D is a crucial part of the perpetual (re)negotiation and (re)imagination of security and control at the borders. Nevertheless, the issue of operational implementation and its political consequences warrants further engagement for future research on R&D in security contexts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors at Security Dialogue for extensive feedback and helpful comments. Furthermore, the author wishes to thank Maria Mälksoo and Bruno Oliveira Martins for providing feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded through the DOC-stipend by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (DOC 25314)

ORCID iD

Clemens Binder

Notes

Clemens Binder is a postdoc researcher at the Centre for Military Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Previously, he was a researcher at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs and holds a PhD from the University of Vienna. He has worked on the intersections of border security, migration control and technologies as well as critical security issues more broadly.

Interviews and Observations

Interview 1: Project Participant, Online, 26 May 2021.

Interview 2: EU Official, Online, 1 February, 2020.

Interview 3: EU Official, Online, 20 November, 2020.

Interview 4: EU Official, Brussels, 2 March, 2020.

Interview 5: EU Official, Online, 21 October, 2020.

Interview 6: EU Official, Online, 23 November, 2020.

Interview 7: EU Official, Online, 1 December, 2020.

Interview 8: Agency Official, Online, 18 June, 2020.

Interview 9: Agency Official, Online, 20 November, 2020.

Interview 10: Agency Official, Online, 29 April, 2020.

Interview 11: Agency Official, Online, 10 December, 2020

Interview 12: Project Participant, Online, 28 May, 2021.

Interview 13: Project Participant, Online, 16 March, 2021.

Interview 14: Project Participant, Online, 26 May, 2021.

Interview 15: Project Participant, Online, 10 August, 2021.

Interview 16: Project Participant, Online, 14 July, 2021.

Interview 17: Project Participant, Online, 15 June, 2021.

Observation 1: Andromeda Final Presentation, Online, 23–24 June, 2021.

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