Seamless Passenger Journey: Truth, Trust, and the Commercial Governance of Digital Borders

This thesis critically investigates the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) ‘Seamless Passenger Journey’ political infrastructure, also known as One ID, through the lens of critical border security studies, digital studies, and feminist post-humanism. Based on my immersive fieldwork with IATA’s One ID team, the research interrogates how Seamless—an end-to-end biometric passenger processing infrastructure—is legitimated and normalized by the commercial aviation industry. This thesis inquires how IATA and other industry actors’ commercial governance techniques of mobilizing truth and trust attestations, discourse, and political-economic logics institutionalize Seamless’ legitimacy and necessity for how passengers are managed at airports and borders.

The thesis progresses through materially grounded analytical entry points: biometric technologies, industry leaders of IATA and ICAO, and ePassports. My analysis into biometrics examines how empirical-positivist epistemes and operational/trust frameworks render biometric visualizations as truthful, while masking embedded racialized hierarchies. My analysis of IATA and ICAO explores their driving logics and how they reconcile security mandates imposed onto passenger processing through economic liberalism. Finally, my investigation into ePassport’s IC chip unpacks its technical infrastructures of Evidence of Identity, Logical Data Structures, and Public Key Infrastructure, and through them, I analyse how they function as border risk modulating mechanisms that generate and leverage trust attestations. Through the three entry points, I discuss how they enact commercial governance to affect border management and mobility precarity.

A key contribution of this research is its theorization of trust and truth as infrastructural contingencies that enable Seamless to operate as a legitimized and depoliticized form of border governance. This also highlights how industry actors are significantly involved in shaping borders’ possibilities, and foregrounds the synchronization of market logics, biopolitics, and algorithmic governmentality. This work calls for greater critical engagement with the epistemes and socio-political implications of emerging digital border infrastructures, especially as they increasingly intensify harmful systemic hierarchies used to manage mobility under the guise of efficiency and technological objectivity.