A society of security is not necessarily a society of freedom. A society of security is a society dominated by the irrepressible need for adhesion to a collection of certainties. It is one fearful of the type of interrogation that delves into the unknown, unearthing the risks that must surely be contained within.
This is why in a society of security, the priority is, at all costs, to identify that which lurks behind each new arrival — who is who, who lives where, with whom, and since when, who does what, who comes from where, who is going where, when, how, why, and so on and so forth. And moreover, who plans to carry out which acts, either consciously or unconsciously. The aim of a society of security is not to affirm freedom but to control and govern the modes of arrival.
The current myth claims that technology constitutes the best tool for governing these arrivals — that technology alone allows for the resolution of this problem, a problem of order, but also of awareness, of identifiers, of anticipation and predictions. It is feared that the dream of a self-transparent humanity, stripped of all mystery, might prove to be a catastrophic illusion. For the time being, migrants and refugees are bearing the brunt of it. In the long run, it is by no means certain that they will be the only ones.
Under such conditions, how else might we resist the claim by one province of the world to a universal right of predation, if not by daring to imagine the impossible — the abolition of borders, that is to say, giving all inhabitants of the Earth — human and nonhuman alike — the inalienable right to freedom of movement on this planet?
– Necropolitics (2019), pp. 103-4