Introduction: Digitizing Borders, Cities, and Landscapes

abstract:This special issue asks what digital state-making means in border zones, cities, and landscapes. As a complement to discussions of such processes in cyberspace and virtual territory, we elaborate by exploring connections to physical territory. Authors provide firsthand accounts from a number of global locations where tech surveillance is especially apparent: the US-Mexico border; the city of Los Angeles; and the Uyghur borderlands of Northwest China. In these contexts, physical territory is important as a crucial linking point between massive databases in the cloud and technical systems on the land. It is where the state can surveil bodies and movements in order to identify them, codify them, and enter their features as data to be used later. This is happening at multiple levels of governance from national, regional, to city departments. And the differential impact on marginalized groups is evident throughout.