Entangled Borders: How the Digital Transformation of Sovereign Borders Creates Transnational Population Filters

Abstract Sovereign state borders are performed by actor-networks comprising personnel, infrastructure, laws, ideas and other entities that collectively filter populations based on their compatibility with political communities. Over recent years, new digital technologies, such as biometrics and algorithmic threat assessments, are increasingly forming part of sovereign border actor-networks. This digitisation is entangling the borders of different sovereign states as they enact and rely on common actants, notably traveller data doubles and data derivatives. Research studying digital border entanglement still sees sovereign borders as fundamentally shaped by the national contexts where people are subject to the sovereign decision. In contrast, this article argues that new digital bordering technologies are creating transnational population filters that produce political communities and ‘bare life’. The creation of transnational sovereign population filters is identified in two examples of border digitisation: the establishment of a transnational drone program and the formation of plane passenger data analysis systems. This finding significantly challenges dominant moral and legal framings of sovereign states as autonomous moral actors responsible for the top-down organisation of their borders. As such, Luciano Floridi’s conceptualisation of distributed moral responsibility is drawn upon to propose a distributed form of sovereign responsibility that is more applicable to digitally-enabled transnational sovereign borders.