When risks meet: The dance of experience, professional expertise and science in border security technology development
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895818811896 |
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895818811896
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2020, Vol. 20(2) 207 –225
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895818811896
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When risks meet: The dance
of experience, professional
expertise and science in
border security technology
development
Teresa Degenhardt
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Mike Bourne
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Abstract
As policing and threats become increasingly transnational and plural, practices of managing risk
increasingly use technologies that promise certainty. Drawing on a study of the creation of a new
border detection device, and ideas from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that devices
deployed as objective tools for risk assessment and management in the policing of borders, and
the laboratories that develop them, are not simply linear applications of scientific knowledge
to control risk but rather are crucial sites in which multiple and contending conceptions and
practices of risk converge. Following the interactions of scientists, border guards, policing agents
and the EU shows how an official discourse of risk, a scientific conception and experiential working
knowledge of risk all ‘danced’ together in the development of a portable detection device. In the
process experiential/contextual and professional knowledge of risk were often privileged over
rationalistic and statistically based risk assessment.
Keywords
Border, CBRNE, policing, risk, security, technology
Corresponding author:
Teresa Degenhardt, Lecturer in Criminology, School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work,
Queen’s University Belfast, 6 College Park, Belfast, BT7 1LP, Northern Ireland.
Email: t.degenhardt@qub.ac.uk
811896CRJ0010.1177/1748895818811896Criminology & Criminal JusticeDegenhardt and Bourne
research-article2018
Article
208 Criminology & Criminal Justice 20(2)
Introduction
One of the cornerstones of the EU is the free movement of people and goods, but since
9/11, security and crime control have become a central concern. With increased concern
about transnational terrorism, our inability to predict risk has become apparent, causing
us to privilege the prediction of catastrophes in the governmentality of the future (Aradau
and Van Munster, 2009). According to Amoore (2013: 1; Beck, 1992, 2013; Douglas,
1994; Giddens, 1991) ‘the imagination of “low probability, high consequence” events
has become an overwhelming feature’ in how we understand risk. Borders now play a
crucial role in the regulation of risk (Aas, 2005; Bowling, 2013; Pickering and Weber,
2006, 2013; Wonders, 2007). The employment of technology, particularly algorithmic
technologies, information systems and biometrics, is now hailed as a ‘magic bullet’, ‘an
absolute security provider’ (Ceyhan, 2008: 102; Marx, 2005), an ‘ultimate solution’ to
‘the unknown and risk generated by globalization and reinforced by September 11’
(Ceyhan, 2008: 103). In short, then, technology is supposed to make known and author-
ize decisions in the face of a radical ‘non-knowing’ (Mythen and Walklate, 2016a: 408).
Technology increases the capacity to surveil and control, combining crime control and
containment with the possibility of pre-emption (Bowling et al., 2008; Marx, 2005;
Wilson, 2006). In doing so, as Katja Franko Aas (2005: 208) claims, ‘contemporary
technological paraphernalia […] not only enables fortification of the border, it also
reshapes the border according to its own logic’.
This article explores how risk and security are engaged by those that create security
technologies. It is based on a social science study of an EU-funded technology research
project in which scientists and laboratories across Europe engaged with end-user border
guards to develop a handheld device to detect CBRNE (chemical, biological, radiologi-
cal, nuclear and explosive)1 smuggling at EU borders. The article contributes to the
growing engagement with borders and risk across the fields of criminology and security
studies (Aradau and Van Munster, 2009; Bigo, 2016; Crawford and Hutchinson, 2016;
Mythen and Walklate, 2016b). It expands knowledge of the governance of security
(Wood and Shearing, 2007) by highlighting the role played by research groups and labo-
ratories in shaping emerging modalities of transnational policing in the context of inter-
national terrorism. In doing so we show how diverse actors’ engagement with different
forms of risk, ways of knowing risk and security narratives combined and redirected
technology from catastrophic risks of CBRNE terrorism towards wider materials and
modes of policing at borders by detecting cocaine, tobacco, explosives and radiation.
We draw on concepts from science and technology studies (STS) to engage the social
and political dimensions of the processes of technology development within the labora-
tory as a crucial component in the determination of seemingly neutral and objective
rationalities deployed by the technology. We argue that a device is more than just a tech-
nological tool and should be seen as an important component in the process of transna-
tional policing (Bowling and Sheptycki, 2015) and in the deployment of specific
rationalities in the governance of security. We ask, given the heterogeneous nature of the
scientific process, how are supposedly apolitical, technical, ‘objective’ facts of risk for-
mulated to create the rationale for a device alleviating risk? Engaging STS allows us to
open the ‘black box’ of technology to scrutiny by exploring how the device is built.
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