Security technologies and the global criminalization of migration: MIDAS, the IOM, and outsourcing border control

This thesis contributes to border criminology scholarship by focusing on practices and technologies that contribute to the merging of border control and criminal justice in the Global South. Specifically, I examine the role of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and its Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS) in shaping border controls in Nigeria. Empirically, the thesis draws on elite interviews with IOM officials, document analysis of technical and policy documents authored by the organization and by Nigerian federal authorities, and non-participant field observations in Abuja, Nigeria. Theoretically, I propose a synthesis of performativity and pragmatism as a useful analytical framework for understanding the political effects of MIDAS. Applying this theoretical framework to my primary empirical material, I make three substantive arguments. First, by highlighting the active role of Nigerian federal officials in shaping the roll-out of MIDAS, I argue for the importance of foregrounding Southern agency in analyses of crimmigration control as a global phenomenon. Nigerian officials actively utilize the border control system to engage in performances of ‘biometric statehood,’ to affirm their political authority domestically vis-à-vis competing political actors and to constitute the Nigerian state as a legitimate actor within the international system of sovereign states. Second, I characterize the IOM’s MIDAS-related capacity-building practices as pedagogical performances, intended to affirm its technical expertise and supposed political neutrality. The organization’s officials and public communications exhibit a solutionist understanding of migration, through which the latter is conceptualized as a technical, rather than political, problem that the IOM is well-placed to ‘solve.’ In Nigeria, key to this ‘solution’ has been the merging of the legal and practical frameworks of migration control and criminal justice. Finally, I argue that the technical components of MIDAS itself serve to constitute migration as a governable ‘problem’ amenable to techno-solutionist crimmigration control interventions.