Security, Risk and the Biometric State: Governing Borders and Bodies (review)

Benjamin Mueller’s Security, Risk and the Biometric State, Governing Borders and Bodies, is a thought-provoking book that offers powerful insight into the dynamics of governance, biopolitics and international relations. Through careful examination of the relationship between risk and biometrics, seen as central constituents of the practices for securing national sovereignty, the book engages directly with some of the most contentious aspects surrounding its implications for security and contemporary life. In particular, Muller observes an evolving form of governing through modern technologies that, in shaping a culture of risk aversion and fostering a rise in centralized state authority, are changing the border’s relations with the public. The author approaches the subject in a novel way and carefully interconnects topics of modern governance, liberal power and shifts in traditional understanding of liberty and agency to raise critical questions about cultural and sociopolitical ramifications of risk management practices that rely on sophisticated technologies.

Through a dynamic framing the book weaves together notions of risk, security, technology and identity to give rise to the concept of the “Biometric State,” in which these practices of encoding bodies foster a shift in governance. Muller builds this idea upon Foucault’s work on biopolitics, by revisiting the shift from governing a territory to governing of the population, and takes us beyond conventional notions of the modern liberal State to critically explore its current preoccupation with “power over life” as a contemporary deployment of biopolitics. As a consequence, the author observes a transformation of border security into border management through “biometric” or measured bodies. This argument is successfully supported by case studies that further demonstrate how the biometric state has emerged from a “risk society” that consents to governing uncertainty through the technologization of security.

International discourses of globalization in the post 9–11 politics of the United States have presented conflicting metaphors of sovereignty, including conceptualizations of highly porous borders meant to guarantee global market flows while simultaneously advancing a thickening of the same borders to secure citizens from perceived catastrophic dangers. While the book addresses this contradiction, its main objective is to depict the emergence and proliferation of a border transformed into a virtual form that extends across the political landscape of the country. In engaging the analysis with the challenges this phenomenon poses for the politics of citizenship and immigration, the discussion interrogates implications for a shifting political imagination that may have already developed into new forms of social sorting. The multilayered cultural and social fabric of the population and the new ubiquitous nature of this contemporary border, reveal the need to reframe conceptual analysis about the borderlands where actual resources, experience and expertise are eclipsed by the shadow of a new “zero-risk” approach to security. Muller explains how “reliance on risk management in border security leads inevitably to a “zero risk” approach [that] acts most acutely to the detriment of the long-standing trans-border cultural, political, and market relations that make the borderland so robust.” He concludes that trends since 9–11 of centralizing control have disempowered the border region, threatening local knowledge and identity.

Organized in eight generally brief chapters, the book effectively combines interdisciplinary theory and empirical evidence. The first four chapters provide an overview of the theoretical concepts that shape the author’s ideas, while the latter ones comprehensively integrate case studies to ground the discussion both temporally and spatially. For example, specific cases of the Canada-US border, and Iraq situate otherwise abstract concepts and temper a potentially simplified reading of the text. Muller’s treatment of the subject provides a level of detail appropriate for students and researchers seeking a well-grounded introduction to the topics, an approach that should also be a valuable resource for analysts interested in the broader implications of these modes of border security. Throughout the book the reader experiences a kind of maturation of the author’s original view-points from a primarily theoretical narrative with many technical terms and scholarly concepts of the earlier chapters...