ABSTRACT
The ability of states to control their borders had become an important aspect of statecraft, borders being regarded as ‘the physical manifestation of the sovereignty of the nation and the power of the national state to secure that nation from harm’. Large investments have been made to develop new and more advanced technologies of surveillance and border control, while in biometric laboratories, new forms of biometric identification for use in border control are continuously being explored. Routinization of the extraordinary is apparent in the treatment of migrants’ bodies as suspicious moving objects that the border police have the right to inspect and enrol or register at any given time or place. The notion of assemblage highlights the changeable, incoherent and moving parts of the border world, the social, political and economic forces that shape and are shaped by it.
