The logic of border governance in the Schengen Area: Borders as striation

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on borders that considers its operability as a governance space. This reading means transcending the territorial aspect of a border - and its sense of sovereign affirmation - and looking at its functionality in terms of circulation being a matter for government, in what should be called the border's biopolitical decline. In this sense, government practices that define the border may be read in terms of the striation of space rather than the containment of a territory. The governance problem the border poses is one of reconciling porousness and selectivity. This encourages the construction of "smart borders" via innovations of a technological nature that essentially focus on the filtering capabilities of actuarial and biometric techniques. The paper addresses the transformations of this kind noted in the Schengen Area.