Border Scans: Sovereignty, Surveillance and the Customs Service in Ghana

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Abstract
This article explores the relationship between surveillance techniques and the production of sovereign statehood in an effort to track the day-to-day practices through which state authority is constituted in the context of globalization. This article explicitly probes the processes through which new forms of sovereignty come into being within the life of the state. It takes as its point of departure the operations of Ghana's Customs Service, a body charged with policing the nation's frontiers and collecting the bulk of state revenue. Contrasting the work of a multinational firm contracted by the government of Ghana to carry out Customs duties and the conventional roles of Ghanaian Customs officers, this article examines the ways in which the manifold technologies of neo-liberalism (from contractual forms and modes of accountability, to the apparatuses of surveillance) redefine the capacities, authority, and imagination of both state and self, held by state agents. Here we see a sovereignty that is increasingly derived outside of the state even as the play of sovereign power is intensified and deeply diffused within it.

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