Winners of the 9th Border Criminologies Dissertation Prize
We are proud to announce the winners of the ninth Border Criminologies Masters Dissertation/Thesis Prize, who will receive £200 and £100 worth of Routledge books.
Border Criminologies seeks to support early career researchers working on the intersections between border control and criminal justice. From a strong list of entries, the judging panel, consisting of academics from the Border Criminologies network identified the following winners:
Giovanna da Custódia, winner for the thesis: 'Algorithms for Hire: The Private AI-Powered Surveillance Technologies Behind the U.S. Immigration Black Box'.
About Giovanna:
Giovanna da Custódia is a researcher and policy analyst specialising in the governance of emerging technologies, with a particular focus on AI, surveillance, and accountability in public institutions. She recently completed an MSc in Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she was awarded the European Institute Prize for Best Overall Performance. Her research has contributed to projects for organisations including UNESCO, the Mozilla Foundation, and the European Parliament, examining issues at the intersection of digital governance, democracy, and human rights. Her prize-winning dissertation, 'Algorithms for Hire: The Private AI-Powered Surveillance Technologies Behind the U.S. Immigration Black Box', explores how public-private partnerships in immigration surveillance reshape transparency and accountability in border governance.
About her thesis:
This dissertation explores how the growing use of AI-powered surveillance technologies in U.S. immigration control is reshaping the conditions for democratic accountability, transparency, and oversight, with particular attention to the role of private-sector involvement. Building on Ashley Deeks’ ‘Double Black Box’ framework, this dissertation extends the analysis by showing how public–private collaboration amplifies the opacity already built into both national security governance and algorithmic systems. Through a qualitative thematic analysis of two key AI-powered tools used by U.S. immigration control - HART and FALCON-SA - the study identifies a set of interlocking dynamics that together limit the visibility and contestability of immigration enforcement practices and decisions.
The findings show that institutional secrecy and the technical opacity of algorithmic systems are closely intertwined, each reinforcing the other and together producing a deeply embedded lack of transparency. Importantly, the dissertation demonstrates that private-sector involvement intensifies these dynamics. Proprietary protections, fragmented chains of responsibility, and procurement arrangements that foster long-term dependency on contractors all contribute to diffusing accountability and shielding decision-making processes from scrutiny. In this context, the study advances the concept of a ‘privatised black box,’ in which responsibility is dispersed across public and private actors with ostensibly misaligned responsibilities and loyalties, making meaningful oversight and redress increasingly difficult to achieve.
By bringing together insights from migration studies, AI governance, and critical security studies, this dissertation offers one of the first empirically grounded accounts of how privately developed technological infrastructures reshape the governance of immigration control. Rather than focusing solely on issues such as bias or accuracy, it shifts attention to the structural conditions that entrench and amplify the opacity of these systems, weakening democratic oversight. Crucially, the implications extend well beyond immigration: as similar AI-driven, privately developed systems are increasingly embedded across the public sector - from policing to healthcare to welfare administration - the dynamics identified here point to a broader reconfiguration of state power, where decision-making becomes harder to interrogate, less contestable, and more difficult to hold to account. In this sense, the paper speaks not only to migration governance, but to the future of democratic oversight in an era of outsourced, algorithmically mediated public administration.
Simone Schwab, runner up for the thesis: 'A study of the criminalization of boat drivers in Samos and their Sense of Self'.
About Simone:
Simone Zaza Schwab is a recent graduate of the MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology (Applied Track) at the University of Amsterdam and holds a bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. She conducted her master's thesis in collaboration with the Human Rights Legal Project on Samos and is currently active with the collective de:criminalize. Focusing on both internal and external borders, her research interests lie in the increasingly blurred boundaries between migration and criminal law, with a particular focus on how these practices shape personal understandings of time, space, selfhood, and justice. Using storytelling and ethnography, her work explores how people experience, navigate, and make sense of bordering practices in their everyday lives.
About her thesis:
The criminalisation of boat drivers who carry migrant people across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece has become a systematic practice in Greece. Within these criminal proceedings, the personal narratives of the drivers, as well as those of passengers, are frequently marginalised or dismissed by the dominant legal discourse. This study examines the divergent narratives involved in the criminalisation of boat drivers and explores how these narratives shape drivers’ sense of self.
The study reveals a disconnect between the legal framework and the lived experiences of those involved. Passengers often adopt strategies of moral reasoning when discussing their driver, depending on intentions, behaviour, actions, and outcomes of those actions. Drivers’ narratives centre on the lived realities of crossing a border, emphasising feelings of responsibility and fear while navigating dangerous sea conditions and avoiding interception by border patrols. The legal framework, however, criminalises the driver largely irrespective of these factors. Court discourse is shaped primarily by ethnicity and asylum status, with limited attention to the actual events on board. This disconnect leaves boat drivers with a fragmented sense of self, as they question their morality and seek coherence in how they understand and narrate their actions.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the island of Samos, Greece, this study brings together in-depth personal accounts from passengers and drivers. By focusing on these narratives, the study moves beyond a simplistic legal dichotomy of good and bad and instead seeks nuance, highlighting how legal processes can marginalise and harm lived experiences. Furthermore, this study shows how driving the boat exists within the context of Europe’s closed borders, and how criminalisation further endangers the lives of migrant people rather than protect them. It provides an empirically grounded account of the harmful effects of current ‘smuggling’ laws, centring the voices of those directly involved.