Sensing European Alterity. An analogy between sensors and Hotspots in transnational security networks

The experiment we propose to conduct in this Chapter explores the extent to which an analogy between architectures of sensor networks and trans-national security orders can have heuristic consequences and reveal new aspects of the latter term of comparison. Experiments’ goal does not pertain to the realm of discovery, but to that of creation. To what extent can an analogy between data and institutional architectures provide new insights for inquiry? The two elements of the proposed analogy are sensor data infrastructures and border security networks for migration management. Not only such security networks heavily rely upon data infrastructures, they also articulate trans-national orders which “hit the ground” at distinctive, state-bound locales. One type of such locales are the so called “Hotspots”: migrant registration and identification centres set up at the external borders of Europe in 2015. Following literature on sensor architectures, we propose to consider four relevant features in order to unfold the analogy: the topological position of sensors as input devices, their ability to produce knowledge that would not otherwise exist, separation of concern and data reduction as design criteria. In conducing this experiment, we also propose a methodological and epistemological challenge. First, the proposed analogy is followed to the point of reaching its own limits. Second, we further Bruno Latour's insight that textual accounts are the social scientist’s laboratory. A well written text is a laboratory in that it makes the production of realism and objectivity progressively more complicated by constantly listening to the objections exerted by humans and artefacts. Such “listening to objections” has taken place through the analysis of regulation and evidence collected during fieldwork at Hotspots in the Hellenic Republic in 2018, as well as analysis of information systems and technical documents developed by Hellenic and European authorities. As a result of such “listening”, we suggest that migrant registration and identification centres can be understood as “sensing nodes of equivalence”. On one hand, they might be conceived of as “sensors” of European infrastructures for the “processing of alterity” (Pelizza 2019). On the other hand, registration and identification centres are not only input “points” of European migration management architectures: they are also “nodes” of equivalence in global security networks. We suggest that Hotspots are nodes tasked with making non-European standards and procedures linguistically and materially equivalent to national ones.