“Assess in advance, control where required”. Risk, privatisation and data in EU customs security

ABSTRACT

International relations and security studies scholars have produced groundbreaking analyses that shed light on the control of transnational human mobility, which emerges as a central governmental problematisation that security apparatuses in the EU and elsewhere deal with. However, scholars tend to pay less attention to non-human, cargomobilities. In this paper, I explore how cargomobilities are controlled by focusing on two case studies: the EU’s Authorised Economic Operator (AEO) programme and the Import Control System (ICS2). Both initiatives support the operationalisation of the principle “assess in advance, control where required”, which lies at the core of the EU’s common framework for customs risk management. While the AEO programme requires the outsourcing of advance security controls to trusted economic operators involved in supply chains (e.g. manufacturers, exporters, carriers and importers), the ICS2 allows customs authorities to perform risk analysis through the automated processing of pre-loading cargo data. Borrowing conceptual tools from actor-network theory and governmentality research, I develop an associational understanding of risky cargo, investigate the rationalities that inform the control of cargomobilities in the EU, and attend to both the hi- and low-tech tactics through which these rationalities materialise within the AEO programme and ICS2.

KEYWORDS:

• Cargomobilities
• customs security
• privatisation
• digitisation
• borders

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Next Generation EU: (Grant Number 2022JPFYE8 – CUP E53D23010250006).