The Banalisation of ‘Suspicion’: Politics of Prevention, Digitisation of Prediction, Fate of Travellers

By Didier Bigo

This article argues that there is no single form of security that reduces insecurity but rather forms of (in)security that are contradictory and mutually destructive. This is the case between traditional liberal security, based on evidence, the individual and the penal order, and contemporary predictive preventive security, based on ‘reasonable’ suspicion. The digitisation of data has accelerated this trend towards preventive security, which is created through the creation of specific data-organising categories according to algorithms, the sorting out of profiles of ‘persons of concern’ ranked according to their level of danger, and the so-called ability of artificial intelligence to predict the future behaviour of individuals in order to place some of them under surveillance. This applies not only to terrorists or criminals, but also to many international travellers, making their use banal. The databases of the European agency EU-LISA will help to show the functioning of this new ‘dispositif’ of suspicion, which endangers democratic politics.

International Migration, Volume63, Issue4, August 2025, 13p.