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The Omnipresence of Mobile Borders  

Review by Amrita DasGupta 
 

HUBB DIJSTELBLOEM, 2021, Borders as Infrastructure: The Technopolitics of Border 

Control, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 285pp., ISBN 9780262542883. 

 

Being born and brought up in a family of 1947 India-Pakistan Partition survivors, I have 

always been curious about borders, their existence, manifestations, shapes, and workings. The 

exodus in the wake of the fracture of India and Pakistan took place across proposed 

(invisible) colonial borders that would require decades to manifest physically. Still the 

migrant families that crossed these invisible borders to find shelter in either Hindu majority 

India or Muslim majority Pakistan, both on land and sea, faced the immeasurable 

consequences of lost home and hearth, of lost identity in a (to be formed) new country. Hubb 

Dijstelbloem’s new book, Borders as Infrastructure: The Technopolitics of Border Control 

attempts to answer such questions. Using technopolitical and morphological analysis, 

Dijstelbloem studies the different kinds of European borders (on air, land, sea) in relation to 

human migration.  

 

To map the “materiality and movability of borders and border politics” (57) the author 

extracts scholarly support from Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk’s concepts of 

“mediation”— the intermingling of human, technologies, and nature (59), and “peramorphic 

politics”— the interaction between border and politics (58), respectively. It helps 

Dijstelbloem comprehend the “morphological notions of technopolitics” (57). The objective 

of the book is to problematize the “ontic” and the “ontological” understandings of the border 

(10): in the anthropological sense “ontic” views technology as an instrument whereas 

“ontological” highlights the human-technology relationship. In this case, Dijstelbloem 

explains how these ideas relate to “peramorphic politics”— the shape of the boundary 

affected and produced by politics (ix).  However, in so doing, he exposes the absence of the 

desirable borderless world which seemed achievable with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 



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and reunification of the East and West Germany. He argues that despite the Schengen 

Agreement, Europe monitors and controls movement of its residents through walls and 

border checks between member states which became globally evident during the 2014-2016 

migrant crisis. Such that he proposes “something else has changed—namely, the borders 

themselves” (4) where “everything becomes a border or is perceived as such” (5). To explain 

further, Dijstelbloem defines the soft, hard, visible, invisible, concreate, abstract, material, 

and ideational borders as moveable. Such movements are not only caused by shifting and 

redrawing of state boundaries but are also made mobile through “kinopolitics” where, with 

the help of technology, the borders move with the migrants: iris scans in airports, biometrics 

at land and port boundaries (7). The increase in surveillance and its direct impact hinder the 

movement of migrants, forcing people to take risky routes to reach their destinations.  

 

The book, comprising of eight chapters ending with a focused section on changing/emergent 

borders owing to COVID-19, was born out of the author’s interest to understand the influence 

of technological developments on the creation of global tensions in the backdrop of the death 

of eleven detainees held at the detention center in Amsterdam’s Schiphol’s International 

Airport, in Schiphol East (the detainees had fallen prey to a fire breakout on October 27th, 

2005). Nonetheless, during his research period the role of border politics in the 2014-2016 

refugee crisis creation added nuance to his project.  

 

Borders continue to be a compound issue in academic study and political debates. To 

effectively communicate ideas that where writings and theoretical frameworks employed in 

the book fall short, Dijstelbloem engages with ethnographic photography. He places a 

selected few photographs from Henk Wildschut’s collection of European migration, camps, 

and border controls at the end of each chapter. It clearly identifies the focus of the book: 

borders. The use of original photographs allows the presentation of the anthropological 

observations from the field. It not only enhances insight but also compels the readers to think 

through an image as if it were complex evidence.  

 

The book evaluates the proposed concepts in association with the infrastructural 

developments of the European borders that began from the mid 1890s.The function of the 

border institutes and border technologies (Frontex Agency, European Asylum Dactyloscopy 

Database, Schengen Information System, Visa Information System) as border infrastructures 

that allows the border to move is detailed by analyzing the difference it exercises in 



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documenting and surveilling migrants and travelers (27). Thus, the book tries to highlight 

how various infrastructural additions to the border multiplies its ability to exist in any place 

where there might be a migrant. 

The author provides precise examples of the real-life functions of the border infrastructures 

from the field: First, he deals with the European airspace which shapes the European Union’s 

global border by passing decisions about curtailment and permission of movements of people 

who want to access the airport. Here, the class of “kinetic elites” are allowed to move but the 

movement of others is obstructed (82). The decisions are “mediated” through infrastructural 

functions as design, detection, and detention. Second, he is attentive to the creation of 

seascapes as borders in Europe. This he says was fueled by the alarming escalation in the 

numbers of undocumented migrants leading to security concern in the Greek Aegean Islands 

in 2014-2016. Such a condition was forced by the Syrian war in which the migrants arrived in 

Europe by crossing the sea while the land borders remained strictly closed. Dijstelbloem, 

diagnoses the effect of closed borders and the purpose of the consequent initiation of the 

European Surveillance System on both land and sea by conducting in-person interviews in 

Athens during which he asked his interviewees about their perspective on marking Chios and 

Lesbos as a critical space termed “hotspot” (165).  Though the author talks about several 

issues in the context of “infrastructural investigations,” they never lose sight of the necessity 

of “humanitarian borders” as an alternative to “extreme infrastructures” (179). The author 

increases the value of the book by delving into an intelligent enquiry of the contemporary 

border functionalities during the pandemic. He ends the book with a section titled “Coda” 

where he relates the workings of the border infrastructures with virus transmission and 

human mobility.  

This book is a detailed study on borders becoming mobile and is an important read for 

scholars that take interest in border manifestations, border technologies, and its workings in 

relation to legal and illegal migrations. The book, however, leaves much scope for 

discussions around people-centric policy building to negotiate with the inhumane 

undertakings resulting from the infrastructural growth of the borders. At the same time, the 

theoretical framework that the book builds on can also be applicable to the studies of border 

functionalities outside Europe. 

 



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Amrita DasGupta is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Gender Studies, School of 

Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She researches transnational 

migration, borders, sex work, climate crisis and gender in the lower deltaic Bengal. Her PhD 

deals with Indo-Bangladesh water-borders and trafficking in humans.  

 

 

 

 

© 2022 Amrita DasGupta 

 

 


