Postcolonial Surveillance: Europe’s Border Technologies between Colony and Crisis

Europe’s Border and Surveillance Technologies advances a postcolonial reading of border and surveillance technologies by conceptualizing the present-day European border regime as part of a racial-colonial complex that stretches from the contemporary refugee crisis to the colonial era. From the days of colonial conquest to the economic exploitation under the Mandate System and recent years’ interventions in the Orient, the book provides a longue duree perspective to uncover the unacknowledged legacies that have sedimented into the bureaucratic and technological backbone of the European border regime. Europe’s pre-digital colonial history continues to shape the political present and has morphed into EU border technologies, media infrastructure, classification apparatuses, and weaponry. By locating border and surveillance infrastructure between Europe’s former colonies and the current migrant crisis, Madoerin lays bare the colonial fabric of late-modern surveillance technologies–the colonial antecedents of today’s border apparatuses.