| dc.description.abstract | Narratives and material objects are both intertwined with the contemporary politics of migration and crime control in the European Union. In this thesis, I investigate how narratives on migration control have developed in the EU from 1951 and until today by assessing key political documents from this period. In addition, the thesis provides an in-depth study on the Automated Border Control-gate as a concrete materialisation of the political narratives. I explore how these narratives materialises by analysing technical documents and international standards in combination with online video observations as well as focused interviews with police employees. The narratives and the material object are analysed through the theoretical and methodological frameworks of narrative criminology and actor-network-theory. While narrative criminology is used to investigate the political narratives on EU migration and crime control development, actor-network-theory is applied to analyse the concrete materialisation of these narratives. Political narratives are characterised by the ways in which they identify issues of the past and the present, frames individuals or groups who are to blame for these issues as well as providing solutions to the issues at hand. With the use of actor-network-theory, I seek to further expand this view on narratives to also take into account the ways in which material objects also have a role to play in this development. The study demonstrates that the development of EU migration and crime control is mainly driven by three narratives: the collaboration, security, and management narrative. The EU narratives on migration and crime control starts out as a collaboration between European countries to secure peace, mutual trust and solidarity. This narrative gives birth to important cornerstones of the EU such as the freedom of movement and abolition of internal border controls. This political achievement did however create new political issues related to the difficulty to control cross-border crime, terrorism and irregular migration which gave rise to the security narrative. In this narrative, the internal security of the Union is perceived as being at stake by threats and risks stemming from outside the external borders. A third narrative arose at a time where it became clear that the EU would never fully be able to control migration, and therefore needed to find ways to manage it instead. The last narrative is therefore the management narrative and involves a gradual shift from control to management of migration and is identified by wordings such as risk assessment and performance outputs. The findings also show that the three narratives materialised into several different legislations and tools for controlling and managing migration. These materialisations are all solutions implemented to solve the issues of the political narratives. In the security narrative, the biometric passport, and a Visa Information System (VIS), came as a solution to provide more secure identification methods and means of regulating migration. In the management narrative, the EU introduced the Smart Border which promoted the use of automated border control technologies. Here, the ABC-gate becomes an important figure in the narrative. By examining the design, the functionalities and the use of the gate, the thesis illustrates how political narratives are part of the construction of the material object. In addition, the findings suggest that the material object also gives shape to border controls by for example providing a self-service border check for all travellers entering the external border of the EU as well as it relocates border guards from the direct interaction with travellers and are placed at distance for observing behaviour. The most important insight provided by the thesis, is the ways in which the human and the technical is strongly intertwined in control practices and cannot be distinguished as two isolated entities. | eng |