CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Zaslavsky, Maria |
|---|---|
| Title | Seeing Is Believing: EU Border Surveillance And The Case Of Nestor |
| Summary | In light of the EU’s increasing reliance on aerial surveillance technologies and the mediatic visibility of migration and border struggles, this thesis is concerned with the ways in which visuality constitutes a fundamental mode of power through which the European border regime is produced and instantiated. In my research I investigate the lines of sight or gazes produced by the “view from above” (Haraway 1988, 590) engendered by border surveillance technologies, and the bureaucratic or legal architecture which sanctions their use. To this end, I critically examine the EU border regime’s politics of visuality through a focus the 2021 EU-funded project NESTOR (aN Enhanced pre-frontier intelligence picture to Safeguard The EurOpean boRders). The case of NESTOR, a project which seeks to develop a next-generation border surveillance system, raises significant questions about the politics of visibility, visuality, and the techno-militarization of borders. Through a critical content analysis of NESTOR communication materials, I interrogate and unpack the ideological investments and visual politics which underpin the project, and the ways in which they inhere what Joseph Pugliese terms a “statist regime of visuality that produce[s] both symbolic and physical forms of violence for their target subjects” (Pugliese 2013, 571). I argue that NESTOR intensifies the datafication of migration and further propagates the deterritorialization of borders, an enduring paradigm of the EU border regime. I supplement my analysis with a gesture towards seeing otherwise by examining Forensic Oceanography’s 2014 audiovisual work Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case as a potential form of “counter visualityȁ d; (Mirzoeff, 2011, 480). While NESTOR bills itself as an innovative, “next generation” project, it does not constitute a rupture but rather a continuity in the EU’s securitized surveillance practices – and while countervisual practices such as Forensic Oceanography’s Liquid Traces might offer an alternative way of seeing, they too are bound up within a knowledge economy sustained by the EU border regime. |
| Supervisor | Jones-Gailani, Nadia; Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/zaslavsky_maria.pdf |
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