Outsourcing Crimmigration Control: Digital Borders, the IOM, and Biometric Statehood

Overview & Synopsis

Digital technologies have reshaped the boundaries of criminal justice and border control. The merger of these fields has resulted in technologically mediated practices of ‘crimmigration control’ on a global level. This book examines the role of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and its Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS) in shaping these digital crimmigration control practices. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship to develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding the political effects of MIDAS, this book analyses empirical data gathered through elite interviews, document analysis, and non-participant field observations in Abuja, Nigeria. This book reveals how the deployment of MIDAS was underpinned by political and epistemic postcolonial hierarchies between Global North states, the IOM, and Nigerian federal authorities, and how the system contributed to the emergence and expansion of crimmigration control in Nigeria. The deployment of MIDAS was decisively shaped by the agency of Nigerian federal officials. These officials utilized MIDAS in performances of ‘biometric statehood’ to affirm their political authority domestically vis-à-vis competing political actors and constitute the Nigerian state as a legitimate actor within the international system of sovereign states. The IOM, in turn, engaged in ‘pedagogical performances’ to enact its technical expertise and supposed political neutrality while reshaping the legal, operational, and technical nature of border management in Nigeria. In addition to the political goals of the system’s human developers and users, the technical components of MIDAS itself constituted migration as a governable ‘problem’ amenable to techno-solutionist crimmigration control interventions. The analysis in this book contributes to the Southernization and decolonization of criminology, as well as the development of more just and equitable digital futures at the border.