In-Spire Journal of Law, Politics and Societies (Vol. 5, No. 1 – 2010) 72 Whose biopolitics is it anyway? Power and potentiality in biometric border security 1 Owen D Thomas, University of Exeter This article examines how biopolitics can be used as a conceptual resource to understand contemporary border security. Through a combination of risk profiling technology and biometric surveillance, these controls challenge our modern geopolitical assumptions of how power is exerted at the border, whilst proponents suggest that the technology can pre- emptively halt harmful travellers. Yet the identities created by risk profiling may be fallible, suggesting opportunities to contest the biometric border and the power it exerts. Drawing and elaborating upon the case studies of biometric border projects within the United States and United Kingdom that have garnered sustained scholarly attention, this article draws on Hardt and Negri, and Agamben, to offer a biopolitical analysis of the form(s) of power at work in regulating and contesting this ‘biometric border. ’ Each thinker provides a distinct line of enquiry – the expansion of the border as the Agambenite ban, and contestation as Negri’s biopotenza. Yet these analyses may be incompatible. Both Agamben, and Hardt and Negri pursue a metaphysical deconstruction of biopower to ‘correct’ Foucault’s genealogical approach, whilst their differing metaphysics create an impasse between them – it is perhaps here that one may locate the limits of a metaphysical deconstruction of biopower. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. (Foucault, 1989: 17) Introduction The emergence of biometric border controls has garnered sustained scholarly attention. In this article, I examine how the differing accounts of biopolitics found in the work of Hardt and Negri, and Giorgio Agamben, can help to diagnose and conceptualise the form(s) of power at work in the reconfiguration and contestation of contemporary border security. The article comprises two halves. Firstly, I provide a brief discussion of the technological apparatus that underpins this border security mechanism – a combination of risk management and biometric surveillance technology – and summarise its historical emergence as a vital component of border control strategies in the United States and United Kingdom. Subsequently I draw together recent scholarly interventions in order to understand how these new technologies alter the way in which power is exerted at the border, how the modern geopolitical imagination is reconfigured, and what possibilities now exist for contesting these security practices. 2 1 Thanks are due to Andrew Schaap, Nick Vaughan-Williams, and three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 2 Of course, the growth of biometric border controls is a phenomenon extending far beyond the dual scenarios of the United States and United Kingdom. Here I have chosen to use these cases for the value of their rich and sometimes divergent treatment by scholars such as Vaughan-Williams (2009/2010), and Louise Amoore (2006) whose depiction of Heath Bunting forms a key component in the rendering of border contestation.