ARTIFICIAL BORDERS. AI, Surveillance, and Border Tech Experiments

Borders kill.

Already violent global border policies are made all the more violent and arbitrary when border spaces are used as testing grounds for new technologies. With deliberately limited regulations in these areas, an ‘anything goes' frontier attitude informs the development and deployment of surveillance at the expense of people's lives. Thousands have already died. The rest experience old and new traumas provoked by surveillance and technology. But these technological experiments are just one part of a violent global migration machine that exacerbate historical and systemic discrimination.
Based on the author's reporting conducted over the past five years and her personal experiences in borderlands around the world, ARTIFICIAL BORDERS offers a global story of the sharpening of borders through technological experiments such as robodogs, drones, and AI lie detectors. The book details how these technologies are used and by whom, with states and private actors setting the stage for what is possible and which priorities–and who–matter.
But there is also resistance and solidarity as people show up again and again and again to contest this violence. At the heart of policies and technologies are always human stories. While illuminating the harms these new technologies cause, ARTIFICIAL BORDERS more importantly foregrounds the experiences of people on the move who have generously shared their stories, such as Omar al Shawali, a 32-year-old Syrian father of three, Aisha al Halibi, a 31-year-old Palestinian mother of two boys and a girl, and Addissu Abebe, a 45-year-old from Eritrea. A new world is possible and ‘hope is a discipline.' By humanizing the people at the center of these stories in this book, we can change the way we think about borderlands and the people who are caught at their sharpest edges.
Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in technology, migration, and human rights, who has been working in migrant justice since 2008. She is currently co-creator of the Migration and Technology Monitor, the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre for Critical Internet at Harvard University. Petra holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, a Masters of Anthropology from York University, Centre for Refugee studies, and an LL.M in International Law from the University of Cambridge.