Abstract
This article contributes to border criminology and transnational criminal justice research into the role of transnational actors in shaping practices of global justice, punishment and control, as well as to the criminological analysis of penal technologies. I examine the performative effects of the Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS) developed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and I argue that these effects are multidimensional. For beneficiary states, the deployment of MIDAS constitutes a performance of sovereign territorial power, affirming membership in the international society of (biometrically capable) states. For the IOM, the development and deployment of MIDAS and carrying out training sessions operate as pedagogical interventions legitimizing the organization as a neutral, technical expert of migration management. Finally, MIDAS itself performatively acts upon its targets, constituting ‘the migrant’ as a governable, potentially risky subject and constituting ‘migration’ as a problem amenable to depoliticized techno-solutionist interventions.
Highlights
Border criminologists have highlighted the increasing importance of understanding immigration law and migration control as key factors of contemporary practices of punishment, control and social exclusion (Bosworth et al, 2018)
Uncovering the politics of global crimmigration control practices is central to the projects of border criminology and Transnational Criminal Justice (TCJ)
A performative analysis of transnational actors operating in this field—as well as the border control devices they have developed and deployed—can be useful to this academic endeavour, and provides the foundations for a more thoroughgoing ‘onto-political’ (Connolly, 1992: 119) critique of crimmigration control
Summary
Border criminologists have highlighted the increasing importance of understanding immigration law and migration control as key factors of contemporary practices of punishment, control and social exclusion (Bosworth et al, 2018). In spite of such warnings, border criminologists and scholars of TCJ have recently demonstrated the full critical potential of performativity, based on Judith Butler’s formulation of the concept in her Gender Trouble and later writings (Butler, 2007, 2010) In her analysis of gender, Butler does not suggest that pre-existing subjects choose to perform either masculine or feminine gender ‘roles’, but more radically that there exists no gendered subject independent of these performances; they are constitutive of gendered identities, in the sense that ‘gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (Butler, 2007: 34). Performances are based on, constrained and shaped by existing social and material structures (Weber, 1998) Seen in this light, the lens of performativity provides an avenue for critically examining how—through what discourses, practices and material interventions—statehood, global crimmigration control and ‘the migrant’ as a political subject are constituted and naturalized in a globalized age. I substantiate these claims through a performative analysis of the IOM’s MIDAS
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