Taming future mobilities: biopolitics and data behaviourism in the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS)

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I critically engage with the European Travel Authorisation and Information System (ETIAS), looking at the rationalities underlying its introduction, its system architecture and its proposed functionalities. Tracing the biopolitical problematisation of the border that led to ETIAS, I argue that the system embodies a shift towards data behaviourism in the regime of truth underlying the biopolitical regulation of the EU border. Data behaviourism establishes a new way of seeing conduct, adding a potential future layer to it. Taming future mobilities through data-mining and future-oriented algorithmic processing, ETIAS imagines mobile subjects in terms of their motility and thereby produces dividuals and blurs the spatio-temporal boundedness of the EU border. ETIAS thereby complicates resistance by avoiding fixed identities and instead rarefies subjects through seeing them as being constantly emergent through new correlations.