The diffuse border: Intelligence-sharing, control and confinement along Canada’s smart border

Abstract

Taking its cue from Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s notion of apparatus (dispositif), this article explores the assemblage of mechanisms, institutions, discourses and practices that came to be conceptualized as a “smart border.” Through an examination of Canadian policy documents, this article analyses the smart border as a “diffuse border.” Physically extending beyond and inside its geopolitical location through a set of legal, administrative and technological procedures such as refugee containment, counter-terrorism measures and information-sharing, the border thus articulates fluid control measures based on the use of information technologies to more restrictive procedures such as confinement. As a lack of transparency and racialized assessments of dangerousness often characterize its operations, the smart border apparatus calls for an analysis of the ways in which it contributes to the building of an “intelligence paradigm” through which the securitization of the region is undertaken.