Algorithmic Risk Governance: Mapping the Digital Bordering Infrastructure of Cerberus
- Date
- 19 May 2025
- Time
- 15:30 -17:00
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
Abstract
In this presentation (based on an article co-authored with Gavin Sullivan), I introduce our empirical study and critical analysis of Cerberus - a novel algorithmic border control platform deployed in the UK. The 2025 UK Border Strategy promises to ‘revolutionise’ UK border control through the use of ‘advanced risk analytics’ and ‘AI-driven decision-making’. Cerberus is a key component of this regulatory shift: an advanced digital bordering system developed by the Home Office and British Aerospace Engineering (BAE) that fuses together diverse data sources for analysis by machine learning algorithms to identify and pre-empt the cross-border movement of ‘risky’ people and things. This presentation critically analyses Cerberus as a distinctive governance infrastructure, highlighting how it materially assembles risk and suspicion, and reconfigures both power and accountability in UK border governance and legal practices. It draws on an article in the German Law Journal and detailed interviews with Home Office policy experts and data engineers designing this consequential AI-enabled critical national infrastructure. While empirically focused on UK border control practice, the paper also aims to offer a broader methodological and critical repertoire to study, evaluate and contest the rise of algorithmic governance in different domains of international law.
Speaker
Dimitri Van Den Meerssche is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Fellow of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London. His current research studies the impact of new digital technologies on global security governance, with a focus on counterterrorism and border control. He is interested in the forms of inequality and exclusion enacted by practices of algorithmic governance, and how these practices impact political subjectivity and the prospects of collective action.
