Unsafe at any speed? Borders, mobility and ‘safe citizenship’

Abstract

To what extent are emerging strategies to manage and secure the US border contributing to a redesign of citizenship? This article considers the specific architecture of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), the panoply of compliant programs and documents, primarily trusted traveller programs such as NEXUS, and the accompanying commitments to ‘governing through risk’ as conditions of possibility for contemporary citizenship (re)design. In particular, the article considers borders and the politics occurring there to be critical sites where ‘designing safe citizens’ is worked out on the ground. The article asserts that to a certain extent, the border and contemporary bordering practices are designed into contemporary citizenship, as both borders and related practices proliferate far beyond the spatial coordinates of the geographic border. The emerging redesigned citizenship shares much with conceptions of ‘netizens’ raised in relation to the effects networks have on economy, society and politics. Specifically, it feeds on a similar ‘naïve instrumentalism’ that presents the implementation of surveillance and biometric technologies, to name just two, that are integral to contemporary bordering practices, in distinctly ahistorical and apolitical manners. Moreover, citizenship is (re)designed as ‘safe’ according to the logic of ‘governing through risk’, where one's integration into the database renders the citizen ‘safe’ insofar as they are a knowable, manageable and governable subject, thus mitigating potential risk.