| Summary: | This opening chapter introduces the collection of twelve essays, which explore the increasing role of the private sector and private actors in border control and its implications for state sovereignty and citizenship. It sets out the Editors’ main aims, questions posed to contributors, and the collection’s overall structure and key themes. It describes a first section on the limits of state sovereignty, whose essays examine complex interactions between public and private actors in controlling the border. It explains how essays in the second section explore the implications of privatisation for legitimacy and the rule of law at the border. It describes those in the third section that consider whether privatisation is better understood as outsourcing, expanding, or undermining state authority, and assess its impact on those subject to detention and deportation. It then introduces the final set of essays that examine differing practices of privatisation at the border, involving a cast of actors ranging from private citizens and civil society organisations to corporate actors and data managers. The chapter concludes by observing that, collectively, the essays disclose what privatising border control reveals about the limits of the sovereign state.
|
|---|