New Books Network

Mary Bosworth, "Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Apr 16, 2025

Mary Bosworth, a Professor of criminology at Oxford University, dives into the mechanics of the UK's outsourced immigration detention system. She discusses how individuals are treated like packages within a profit-driven supply chain, dehumanized by bureaucratic language and practices. The conversation reveals the systemic violence faced by asylum seekers and critiques the privatized approaches that exacerbate challenges in border control. Bosworth emphasizes the need for humane reforms and innovative community-focused solutions to reshape current policies.

58:36

Episode guests

Mary Bosworth

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Mary Bosworth highlights how the privatized UK immigration detainee escorting system dehumanizes individuals by treating them as logistical tasks rather than human beings.

The podcast reveals that despite high rates of failed deportations, the immigration control system persists due to bureaucratic mandates and economic motivations rather than effective humanitarian practices.

Deep dives

The Impact of September 11 on Border Control Perspectives

The events of September 11 significantly shifted public and academic perspectives on border control and immigration practices. The trauma of the attacks led to a greater acceptance of aggressive policing and profiling, particularly against foreign nationals, as many individuals became more sympathetic to strict security measures. Mary Busworth, reflecting on her own experiences during this period, emphasizes how societal views changed almost overnight, with heightened fears impacting arguments surrounding criminal justice and due process. This atmosphere of suspicion and hostility towards immigrants provided a backdrop for her research into the intersections of criminal justice and immigration enforcement.

Intro

2min

Navigating Borders: Researching Immigration Control

15min

The Dehumanizing Language of Border Control and Bureaucratic Failures

6min

The Hidden Violence of Border Control

10min

Navigating the Complexities of Immigration Logistics

4min

Deportation Dynamics and Bureaucratic Failures

12min

Examining the Challenges of British Border Control and Migration

2min

Exploring Influences on Border Control Perspectives

2min

Rethinking Infrastructure: From Exclusion to Inclusion

4min

In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control (Princeton UP, 2024), Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged.

Told by a senior manager that “this is a logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units. Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it. The contract does not seek to eradicate risk but rather to manage it, determining responsibility and apportioning a financial value to such “failures” as delay, escape, aborted flight or death in custody. Front-line workers and managers depoliticise and normalise their efforts by casting their duties in familiar bureaucratic terms, with targets, “service level agreements” and “key performance indicators.” Focusing on first-hand accounts from workers and lengthy observation and document analysis, Bosworth explores the impact of border logistics in order to ask what it would take to build inclusive infrastructures rather than those designed to exclude.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies.

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