Summary
In recent decades, the expansion of biometric surveillance has displaced and multiplied borders across the world. This is reflective of how border infrastructure – such as roads, railways, fences, checkpoints, markets, pipelines and biometric databases – operates as a tool of securitisation, legitimising certain forms of exchange and mobility while marginalising others. The paper argues that, rather than treating infrastructures as passive instruments of state power, attention to the wider socio‑technical configuration of infrastructure spotlights the agency exerted by infrastructural arrangements. First, the paper shows how border infrastructures are central to a contemporary regime in which connectivity and securitisation are mutually constitutive: roads, corridors and digital networks introduced to enhance flows also lead to new chokepoints, surveillance capabilities and exclusionary practices. Second, it details how these infrastructural arrangements enact forms of violence that are often slow, dispersed and racialised, exposing certain populations to heightened risk and reduced mobility while shielding and enabling others. Finally, the paper highlights how infrastructural agency means that, once built, these systems shape conflict trajectories in ways not envisaged by planners or states. Empirical vignettes drawn from the author’s long-term ethnographic research along the China–Pakistan and China–Myanmar borders illustrate these dynamics.
Main insights
- Border infrastructure enacts both visible and less visible forms of violence, ranging from armed conflict to the slow violence of restricted mobility, everyday hardship, displacement and environmental degradation.
- Infrastructure projects in borderlands predominantly increase legibility – that is, the ability of states, militaries and dominant groups to map, monitor and control territory. Rather than simply ‘opening up’ or ‘modernising’ border areas, new infrastructure projects impose selective mobility regimes with uneven consequences.
- The expansion of biometric surveillance has displaced and multiplied borders across the world. The use of biometric technologies means borders become ever more embodied, increasingly embedded into the sphere of the everyday. In border contexts, such as the Karakoram Highway, the systematic capture and monetisation of human experience has been enacted in explicitly racialised ways, facilitating the movement of some while impeding that of others.
- Local communities often bear the brunt of displacement, militarisation and environmental degradation, even as these infrastructures are presented as neutral vehicles of ‘development’ and connectivity. Border infrastructures are not merely the backdrop to this violence – they structure its geography and intensity by introducing chokepoints and safe havens; providing fresh opportunities for taxation and predation; and generating new forms of exclusion.
Policy Implications
- Policymakers should take infrastructural agency seriously. Once built, infrastructures can shape conflict dynamics, patterns of mobility and political outcomes in ways that exceed the intentions of planners and governments.
- Efforts to reduce border-related violence should engage not only with laws and institutions but also with the material layout and technopolitics of border infrastructures.
- Infrastructure projects should be assessed for how they reconfigure mobility, access and security, recognising that promises of connectivity may conceal processes of exclusion, displacement and intensified surveillance.
- Border interventions should consider the impacts of surveillance technologies and data-driven border management on different populations, particularly given that mobility restrictions and monitoring practices are unevenly applied, often in explicitly racialised ways.