This talk examines the collaborative adoption of shared border security infrastructures in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Their Border of the Future Strategy details plans to develop automated ‘touchless borders’ that minimize contact between low-risk travellers and border officials as well as a ‘single window’ for customs and immigration information across the partners. The five countries already use automated fingerprint-matching to share information about millions of visa and immigration applicants each year using a common infrastructure called the Secure Real Time Platform. To understand these shifts, I advance a conceptual framework using the concepts of 'platformization' and 'evasion'. I then operationalize this framework, outlining recent developments in border infrastructure adoption across the five countries. I argue they are re-casting the border as a platform in ways that deepen pre-existing practices of 'evasive governance'. 

Bio: Jamie Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and graduate fellow at the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist studying information policy, technology governance, and security. Jamie’s doctoral research investigates the role of technology adoption in deepening international cooperation on border security among the Five Eyes partners (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and United States).

Website:https://www.crimsl.utoronto.ca/people/directories/graduate-students/jamie-duncan