Last week in Deep Dive, we read about how technology has both sharpened and redefined the sea border between Turkey and Greece, turning it from a site of international contestation to a site of domestic law enforcement. Today, we’ll look at research on another form of border transformation — the kind that happens when places that are normally sites of domestic law enforcement become the front line of a struggle against an international threat.

Airports were not always the fortresses they are today. It may be difficult to remember, since we’ve been living with the Transportation Security Administration and other such agencies around the world for nearly two decades, but highly securitized travel is not “normal” in a broad, historical sense. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, when airplane hijackings were much more common than they would later become, air travel was not primarily organized around the prevention of hijacking.

Since 9/11, however, air travel has been dominated by the idea that any commercial airline flight might be transformed into a repeat of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The rise of that framing has been stressful to passengers but, as criminologist Martin Nøkleberg writes in a recent article in Security Dialogue, it has been much more disorienting for the airport and seaport officials charged with policing travel in this era of constant vigilance. Nøkleberg’s article focuses on the experience of policing borders — in the sense that air and sea ports are international entry and exit points — that were built to be sites of domestic law enforcement but have spent the last two decades trying to manage the low probability threat of an international terrorist attack.

Nøkleberg spoke to a range of officials in Norwegian international ports of entry — Oslo Airport, the Port of Stavanger, and the Port of Kristiansand — about their experiences managing security at these border posts. What they told him is that, in order to cope with the uncertainty of guarding against events that are difficult to predict and unlikely to happen but could be devastating, they have become obsessed with the process of security provision. Where, in an earlier age, security managers might have considerable latitude to make idiosyncratic choices about how to approach their jobs, since 9/11 there has been a marked shift toward documentation of security protocols and clearly-defined risk management strategies.

Many of the people Nøkleberg spoke to expressed frustration at this increased level of bureaucracy. As one said, security provision “looks much better on paper than it actually is.” Yet all the planning and documentation helps manage the cognitive load of always being on guard against the unpredictable. Risk management plans and the process of sticking to them helps to reassure security providers that they are doing the right things to prevent high impact, low probability events. They also help defray the emotional cost if such an event takes place — if security providers can point to all the boxes that they checked on their security checklist in the run-up to an attack, then perhaps the attack was not preventable in the first place.

Nøkleberg also found that living in a constant state of suspense over something that is unlikely to take place is, in the long run, quite boring. That boredom plays out in a number of ways, including the inflation of minor events to fill time. As one respondent said, when “we have an incident when there isn’t much going on… [for example if] someone finds a hole in the fence, then a big deal is made of it, the police are notified.” The constant focus on the threat of terrorism, even though it is unlikely to take place, causes security providers to feel like the threat should be materializing.

The transformation of air and sea ports in the eyes of the policy world from commercial boons to security risks has led to distinct shifts in how these border areas are policed. As the shift in framing has taken hold, the people charged with actually managing the security risks posed by ports have worked to manage the cognitive effects the new frame has on them. Over time, those coping mechanisms have become institutionalized, creating the port of entry culture that we experience today.

Durrie Bouscaren chronicled the situation at Lake Van, Turkey, which has become a particularly dangerous leg in the journey of many migrants moving from Afghanistan toward Europe. The lake, in eastern Turkey, offers a path for migrants that avoids the many police checkpoints that dot land routes through the region. Yet many smuggler ships are unsafe, and wrecks on the lake are common. Last June, 61 asylum-seekers died when the fishing boat they were on capsized. With displacement in Afghanistan likely to increase following the US military withdrawal from the country, human rights advocates encourage the Turkish government to be more accepting of Afghan asylum-seekers, rather than forcing them to use dangerous routes like the one over Lake Van.

Hanna Homestead urged Congress to use its oversight powers to limit US arms sales to human rights abusers. Of the 43 countries the US sold weapons to in 2020, 40% were found by the State Department to have “significant human rights issues,” including six which abuse their own citizens with impunity. One potential way to limit US arms transfers to oppressive regimes would be to institute a policy that Joe Biden proposed as a senator in 1986, which would require Congress to take a vote approving arms sales to human rights violators. That reform would make arms sales much more subject to public approval, which currently runs strongly against arms dealers. As a recent poll found, 7 in 10 Americans believe that US arms sales make the US less safe.

Anita Elash reported on Canada’s decision to charge a man accused of killing four members of a Muslim family in Ontario with terrorism. The man, Nathaniel Veltman, already faces four counts of murder for ramming the family with his truck in June. Many Canadian Muslims welcomed the news that Veltman would be charged with terrorism, since past incidents of Islamophobic violence, including a 2017 mass shooting at a Quebec mosque, have not been labeled as such. Canadian officials say that violent xenophobia is on the rise in the country.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, but grow lights work in a pinch.

Russia and the UK engaged in a bit of point-counterpoint last week, with Russia taking the position that its navy fired warning shots at a British ship on the Black Sea, and the UK taking the position that “no you didn’t.” The Liberal Democrats, ever the centrist technocrats, came up with a characteristically British solution: surveillance cameras on every British ship.

It’s very important to color inside the red lines.

Dream flags.

Efforts to reduce the radar signature of US Navy ships have gone too far.