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

Apr 19, 2025

Mary Bosworth, a criminology professor at Oxford University and co-director of Border Criminologies, discusses her new book on the UK’s immigration detention and deportation system. She reveals how this system, likened to a supply chain, dehumanizes individuals, reducing them to mere logistical items. Bosworth critiques the bureaucratic language that obscures the humanity of detainees and the financial motivations driving harsh border policies. Through her extensive research, she explores the complexities of border enforcement and envisions an inclusive approach to immigration.

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ANECDOTE

Origin of Research Interest

Mary Bosworth's interest in border control began after witnessing changing attitudes post-9/11 in New York.
She noticed increased student support for criminal justice loosening restrictions on foreign nationals.

INSIGHT

Border Control As Supply Chain

British immigration detention operates like a supply chain, outsourced and privatized.
Facilities, vans, and flights resemble warehouses, transport trucks, and shipping in a commercial logistics system.

INSIGHT

Bordering As Labor Job

Bosworth shifts focus from detainees to workers performing bordering as labor.
She challenges emotional focus to stress economic and banal everyday labor aspects.

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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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