Studying state-private hybrid regimes of security governance through a focus on border security

Samah Rafiq was awarded a BISA Early Career Small Research Grant (ECSRG). The grant allowed Samah to investigate the rise of hybrid security governance in which public authority and private interest increasingly co-produce the practices and legitimising discourses of security governance.  Here Samah discusses the research components, key findings and next steps.

Why do states outsource security functions to private and market-driven actors? And what does this phenomenon tell us about the shifting meanings of sovereignty, governance, and security in international relations? These questions lie at the heart of this project, which investigates the rise of hybrid security governance in which public authority and private interest increasingly co-produce the practices and legitimising discourses of security governance. The project studies these questions with a focus on border security governance.  

This question is especially compelling given the paradox it reveals. Securitisation theory predicts that when an issue is securitised, it becomes subject to exceptional state measures like emergency interventions, enhanced executive powers, and a politics of urgency. Yet, it does not quite tell us why we often see the opposite of this concentration and centralisation of power in some cases, like border security, where states choose to formally delegate security governance functions to private actors. The same neoliberal logic that drives outsourcing in education, transport, or utilities appears to be at work in border governance, despite its deep ties to sovereignty, identity and national security.  

This project explores how and why such outsourcing takes place, and how it is framed and legitimised. Taking a qualitative and discursive approach, it asks how outsourcing contracts, archival records, and policy documents can be read as discursive sites, as spaces through which states perform, delegate and sometimes even obscure the nature of their political authority in global politics. Hence, the project argues that these materials are not merely bureaucratic artefacts but vibrant sources to theorise the epistemological and historical foundations of contemporary security governance.  

Situated at the intersection of international relations theory, critical security studies, science and technology studies, and political economy, the project focuses on the cases of the United Kingdom and India. These countries were selected for their historical relationship, rooted in empire, and for the contrasting but connected positions they occupy in contemporary border governance – representing the Global North and the Global South respectively. Both countries have now turned to private actors to manage their visa regimes on the applications side. Their comparison offers insights into both how contemporary hybrid security regimes operate, but also into how legacies of colonial governance continue to shape contemporary practices and discourses of security.  

The BISA Early Career Small Research Grant enabled me to begin this project through three key research components: 

1. Archival research: At the UK’s National Archives in London, I examined historical records of the Migration and Visas sections of the British government. In parallel, archival records from India’s National Archives were accessed with the help of a research assistant based in New Delhi. These documents shed light on how border control evolved after the formal end of empire.
2. Contemporary policy analysis and interviews: I conducted interviews with policy actors and journalists who work on border outsourcing in the UK. These conversations began to reveal a picture of structural opacity of the outsourcing system, particularly due to corporate confidentiality, and the significant knowledge gaps that exist in public discourse. I also analysed the UK’s 2013 visa applications outsourcing contract (obtained via an FOIA request filed by a journalist), and applied discourse analysis to its content and framing.
3. Research training: BISA funds enabled me to take targeted training in qualitative and historical research methods – archival research, framing of research design overall, and the use of NVivo for coding and data management. 

Key findings

1. Colonial legacies remain an enduring force shaping the governance of borders, and of security today. Archival records from the UK indicate that even decades after Indian independence, British officials hesitated to impose short-term visa restrictions on Indians because they were concerned that the policy would appear discriminatory and would not address overstay concerns. These policy positions of British officials cannot be read and interpreted without factoring in the imperial mobility of colonial subjects during empire.
2. Contemporary outsourcing in the UK is legitimised significantly through market-based business discourses, rather than the language of exceptionalism, as migration securitisation would lead us to expect. In analysing the UK’s visa applications outsourcing contract, I found that efficiency, customer service, and value for money were more dominant justifications for the arrangement.
3. Corporate confidentiality presents a significant barrier to research in this area. My interviews indicated the difficulty of accessing meaningful details about outsourcing contracts, the dispersal of political authority between the state and the market actors, and decision-making. This has implications for both academic research and for accountability in security governance. 

Next steps

This project was designed as the foundation for longer-term research on market-driven and technology-based security governance. The BISA award has been instrumental in making this long-term research viable. The work conducted during this project directly supported successful application to the British Academy’s Small Research Grant scheme, which will now fund this research of two more years. Through this work, I aim to continue exploring how states recalibrate their authority through private partnerships and how these hybrid regimes challenge theoretical assumptions in IR and security studies. I also aim to expand the project’s public-facing dimension, particularly through greater engagement with policy actors, journalists, artists, and practitioners. 

I am grateful to BISA for their support as their grant provided a crucial springboard for this research at an early stage when exploratory and interdisciplinary work often struggles to find material backing. I look forward to sharing further findings via BISA platforms as this work develops.

Photo by Serge Kutuzov on Unsplash