Citizenship and Security (PRIO New Security Studies) by Xavier Guillaume & Jef Huysmans

Author:Xavier Guillaume & Jef Huysmans [Guillaume, Xavier & Huysmans, Jef]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Migration
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

Individualization of governance

Advances in computer technology altered the means available for governing people. There has been a manifold increase in what is knowable about an individual, and an increase in the capacity to ‘pull together a complete picture’ of the citizen (Economist 2010: 13). Thus, X is not just a typical doctor living in the suburbs with his/her family, but someone in the middle of a network of private and public ties. This network could be mapped, should the administration be allowed to access all relevant databases concerning how X used his/her credit card, what sites he/she visited on the net, whom he/she has as friends on his facebook account, or what his/her medical record contains – including the medical records of his/her parents with whom he/she partially shares his/her genetic code. X is not, therefore, an average citizen but rather a detailed ‘individual narrative’ available for the scrutiny of administration. This does not just pertain to a radical increase in the capacities of panoptical power but creates a shift in governmental logic, as security and administrative practices shift away from managing populations towards policing individual citizens.

The introduction of punch cards in the 1950s was the first step towards the automatization of data processing and the enhancement of states’ administrative capacity (Amoore 2009: 59). Later, a wide range of technological improvements followed which enabled data mining, extensive profiling, complex algorithms, network connectivity and the capacity to retrieve information from vast databases. As a result of these technological advances, governance can finally look at the individual in a holistic manner, enabling an ‘individualization’ of administration that was inconceivable in earlier times:

We live today in a personal information society, in which one of the principal uses of the global networks is to exchange detailed profiles of individuals’ characteristics. Personal information is the fuel on which much of modern economy runs; millions of basic decisions – about employment, insurance, lending, risk assessment, benefit entitlement, arrest, taking children into careare made on the basis of the vast quantities of personal information which are now produced and manipulated on an industrial scale.

(Perri 6 and Jupp 2001: 41)

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