With Lucia Sestokas, PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil.

Online | 3:30-5:30 (CET) | Registration form will be available in due course.

According to Brazil's Federal Constitution, the State is responsible for "performing maritime, airport, and border police services", and the Federal Police is responsible for "exercising maritime, airport, and border police functions". After submitting access to information requests regarding the use of facial recognition at the Guarulhos International Airport, the Federal Police's official statement indicated that "the Federal Police had no involvement in the contracting of the facial recognition service", suggesting that the information should be requested "directly to the Guarulhos International Airport Concessionaire S.A.", company responsible for operating the airport under a concession valid for 20 years.

Without denying the importance of the nation-state and far from establishing an opposition between "State" and "private companies", this article proposes to investigate the relationships established between state bodies and private companies through the contracting and operation of border control technologies, with a special focus on the air border at Guarulhos International Airport, the largest Brazilian airport. To this end, documents such as responses to requests for access to information, contracts and publications in the Official Gazette of the Union will be analyzed in order to understand how state and non-state bodies relate to each other.