Book Review: Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing by Sarah Brayne

Abstract

suggests, however, rather than decreasing the number of asylum seekers, deterrent measures only contribute to exacerbate the dangers travelers face in and around border zones, while doing little to discourage the movement of those who feel pressured to leave their homes worrying about the consequences later. The political death of asylum may sound as the theoretically most engaging of the three, evinced by the general populace accepting and abetting the politics of exclusions. It is now accepted that the journey a person shall endure to obtain asylum may entail precarity, exclusion, liminality and legal struggle, over many months of limbo during which the “normal” is suspended and the body becomes the border. Asylum seekers are quietly cast aside socially, while a mixture of law, geography and psychology is astutely used to strategically undermine certain people from landing on sovereign soil where asylum is customarily assured but tacitly denied. When the general public turns a blind eye; when we uncritically buy the crisis rhetoric that criminalizes certain arrivals for their mode of traveling; when we deny violence in the face of evidence; when we, intentionally or subconsciously, feel that certain lives are more grievable than others, then the institution of asylum is weakened and its political death assured. The vast evidence collected in this book certainly supports, and visually maps, the many advances this monograph makes for scholars and students in the criminology of mobility, state crime and citizenship studies. Asylum seekers are made precarious by geographical design and the death of asylum does not occur simply on islands and in remote borderlands of the enforcement archipelago, but more acutely in the treatment of people as islands, within law and geopolitical machinations in the interstitial spaces between states. If a limitation can be noted in this book, it would be its emphasis on the Global North and the costly and perilous journey asylum seekers undertake to reach North America, Europe and Australia. More than a weakness, this may indeed sound like a suggestion to expand the enforcement archipelago to include geographies such as in Asia that may not traditionally appear as prominent and yet are often turned into literal and existential carceral spaces. Here, life and the personal histories of certain individuals are grossly devalued, while the asylum process is seldom treated as more than a loophole in legislation if not a magnet for ill-intended migrants displaced by geographical shifts in migration enforcement and new configurations of power. Their immobility in these spaces threatens their identity and morphs territorial borders to cause the death of asylum.