The Cybernetic Border is a new study by Iván Chaar López which argues that the settler US nation requires the production and targeting of a racialised enemy that threatens the empire.

The cybernetic border is organised through practices of data capture, storage, processing, circulation and communication that police bodies and constitute the nation as a bounded, territorial space. Chaar López historicises the US government’s use of border enforcement technologies on Mexicans, Arabs and Muslims from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how data systems are presented as solutions to unauthorised border crossing. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialised violence. In support of thesis, Chaar López draws on corporate, military and government records, promotional documents and films, technical reports, news reporting, surveillance footage and activist and artist practices. These materials reveal how logics of enmity are embedded into information infrastructures that shape border control and modern sovereignty.

Iván Chaar López is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Principal Investigator of the Border Tech Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of Technoprecarious.

Duke University Press, 248pp, 15cm x 23cm, illustrated paperback, 2024