With Ismini Mathioudaki, postdoctoral researcher on the Infralegalities project at the University of Edinburgh.

Online | 3:30-5:00 PM (CET) | registration form will be available in due course.

This chapter examines how the Evros land border operates as a laboratory for techno-legal border governance and situational awareness, producing a dense “system of systems” that rivals—and in key ways exceeds—maritime surveillance regimes. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Evros region (2024–2025), the chapter analyzes the Automated Border Surveillance System (ABSS) as a terrestrial assemblage of towers, radars, thermal sensors, motion detectors, fences, trenches, patrols, and centralized command centers that together generate a high-resolution operational picture. While EU maritime situational awareness is frequently framed through humanitarian Search and Rescue narratives, the Evros border is primarily embedded within logics of deterrence and territorial defense. This divergence shapes how surveillance technologies are deployed, justified, and normalized within a militarized borderscape characterized by extensive monitoring and limited accountability.

The chapter introduces the concept of polychōra to theorize the border’s multi-sited materiality. Polychōra captures the co-operation of “hard” and “digital” sieves including physical infrastructure, sensors, databases, and communication systems, that sort mobility across checkpoints, camps, sensor grids, legal sites, and back-office analytics. Rather than treating border dispersion as immaterial or abstract, the chapter shows how bordering practices are path-dependent: each detection, biometric trace, patrol log, and expulsion leaves material and legal residues that recalibrate subsequent encounters, tightening or loosening the surveillance mesh in ways that are differentially racialized.

Empirically, the analysis traces the ABSS across multiple sites through a multi-sited ethnographic methodology, including interviews with lawyers, border personnel, and refugees; observations near surveillance infrastructure and the Fylakio Reception and Identification Centre; and interviews with actors involved in national coordination in Athens. Conceptually, the chapter argues that situational awareness does not merely represent territory but actively territorializes it, authorizing anticipatory interventions while dispersing responsibility across fragmented institutional actors and jurisdictions. By conceptualizing Evros as a polychōra, the chapter reframes the contemporary land border as an infrastructure of visibility that simultaneously produces opacity, deniability, and uneven exposure to violence.