LRB Winter Lectures - Borders by Frances Stonor Saunders

Globalisation promised a borderless world, but it has delivered an age of neurotically policed zones and cubicles. To cross a border legally now involves an unprecedented level of scrutiny: fingerprint and iris scans, chips embedded in your passport, hidden sensors to detect your heartbeat and carbon dioxide emissions from thirty feet away, the tick-box confessional of ‘Are you now or have you ever been . . .' Frances Stonor Saunders inspects the complex apparatus of today’s border regimes and their obsession with the verified self.

Frances Stonor Saunders’s most recent book is The Woman who Shot Mussolini. She is a historian, journalist and broadcaster.