Author Description

This collection of essays explores the growing use of the private sector and private actors in border control and its implications for our understanding of state sovereignty and citizenship. In so doing, the book makes a sustained empirical and conceptual contribution to the interdisciplinary body of scholarship on border control, with a particular focus on legal and criminological accounts. It also contributes a new dimension to academic enquiry into the privatisation of policing and punishment. The privatisation of border controls takes many forms and encompasses widely varying practices that range from the contracting out to private security firms of border controls formerly undertaken by state officials to the assumption of monitoring and other interventions by NGOs and even private citizens to entirely new technologies of control. The tasks and roles privatised range from services like cleaning, catering, and transport, to control functions such as detaining, guarding, and escorting by private security companies. Duties to monitor immigration status and report irregularities are outsourced to charities, NGOs, professionals (including doctors, professors, and teachers), as well as to private citizens like landlords, while new tools of digital security and data highways operate above and beyond the border, well away from public view. Together, as the essays show, these topics invite continuing scrutiny, both for their own sake, and for the effects of privatisation on state authority, on membership of the polity, and the legitimacy of the diverse laws, procedures, and practices by which borders are governed today.