Small problems, big solutions: The border politics of corporate patents

The proliferation of digital technologies in border control, particularly data extraction and algorithmic processing of data, has raised public and scholarly concern about discrimination, rights violations, and the amplification of violence for people on the move. Marketed in the name of speed and efficiency, these innovations have also been criticized for amplifying technosolutionism in social and political life. Chair Bruno Oliveira Martins, PRIO, and editor-in-chief, Security Dialogue Keynote address Claudia Aradau, King’s College, London Discussants Silvia Masiero, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo Kristoffer Lidén, PRIO, and deputy editor, Security Dialogue Katja Franko, Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo Aradau's talk in this seminar draws on collaborative research with Charlie Ackland, which examined how corporate actors formulate problems and solutions in their patent applications and granted patents. We propose shifting from a general critique of technosolutionism to an investigation of technoproblematizations of digital technologies with applications at borders. Our mapping of technoproblematizations highlights the contradictions between the fabrication of problems and the invention of solutions. We also advance new methods for engaging with digital technologies and ‘bigness’ in critical scholarship on borders and (in)security. Main speaker Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies and Academic Director of the Methods Centre in the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London. Her current research focuses on how digital technologies reconfigure security and surveillance practices, and how algorithms and machine learning recast relations between security, democracy, and critique.