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.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• border security
• Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative
• trusted travellers
• netizens

Acknowledgements

I wish to express special thanks to Cynthia Weber for her close readings of earlier drafts of this article, exceptional insight into the argument presented, and patience with the revisions. Thanks also go to Jef Huysmans and Xavier Guillame for their comments on an earlier draft of this article presented at the ISA Annual Convention in San Francisco, March 2008. Finally, thanks to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to Samer Abboud and John Measor for engaging comments on earlier drafts. Responsibility for this version is exclusively the author's.

Notes

1. Ahmed Ressam attempted to enter the US through Portland, Washington, aboard a ferry that departed from Victoria, British Columbia. Mr Ressam allegedly planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999. However, at the port of entry in the US, customs officials noticed Mr Ressam was nervous, and he subsequently attempted to flee after being asked for further identification. Of particular interest is the fact that the Ressam case stands as both a successful interdiction of a potential threat by US officials in a pre-9/11 context, and the media and political officials took rather little interest in the case at the time. However, after 9/11, the story of Ressam found a sort of renaissance, as it was regularly touted as rationale for increased border security between Canada and the US.

2. Nearly all of the research reports, working papers and briefs produced by one of the more productive and prominent US institutes which focuses on the Canada/US border focus on some aspect of this relationship between increased security and trade. See http://www.wwu.edu/depts/bpri/

3. Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, US Department of State. Available from: http://travel.state.gov/travel/cbpmc/cbpmc_2223.html [Accessed 13 June 2009].

4. One of the metrics that has emerged from both PNWER, with the aid of the Border Policy Research Institute (BPRI) at Western Washington University, is the ‘Border Report Card’. This is intended to act as a straightforward critique (and potentially applaud and support in some cases) the current border management strategies pursued by both Canadian and US officials.

5. The protection, support, and even valorization of particular ‘forms of life’ (Foucault 1990) is significant in the contemporary redesign of citizenship vis-à-vis border management, but it is important to note that this redesign does not malign the already existing distinctions of race, class, and gender. Indeed, these divisions are regularly reinforced, as the contemporary redesign of safe citizenship is preoccupied with mitigating to nil the panoply of imagined dangers, risks, and catastrophes, attempting to ‘govern the ungovernable’.