Tracing histories of the ‘smart’ passport by focusing on infrastructural media

Abstract

Smart passports rely on forms of infrastructural mediation that have been incrementally incorporated into border regimes over the last decades. For example, a solution developed for a specific societal question (e.g. using numbers instead of names in order to identify eligibility for public pension) has much later been turned into a technique for bordering that has little to do with social welfare. The cultural techniques of assigning numbers to individuals (as pension numbers or personal identity codes), their structuration into electronic databases and the collection of information on passport applicants in digital form have evolved gradually, responding to historically specific needs, fears and desires. In discussing the implementation of cultural techniques that have become central to the emergence of smart passport scenarios, this paper highlights four areas that have influenced these developments: the right to travel as a moral category, forms of inscribing the applicant into a passport document, the emergence and development of interconnected registers and databases, and the dynamic tension between security needs and a desire for forms of smooth travel. The paper suggests that today’s solutions and propositions for smart passports continue to respond specifically to a societal dynamic with a long history in passport issuance and control: on the one hand, the social privileges of kinetic elites who expect smooth and fast-paced travel, and on the other, the suspicion and intensified control directed at those who are in much worse positions. Smart passport scenarios build on this dynamic tension by suggesting further forms of surveillance, investing in forms of infrastructural mediation that enables further forms of data-based securitization. Interventions in today’s bordering regimes therefore need to critically reflect on this long durée of bordering techniques and their infrastructural mediations, particularly if forms of registering, archiving and filtering ought to be influenced in the long term.