From Borderlines to Polychōra: Biopolitical Spatialities of the Digital Border

This article advances the concept of polychōra to theorize the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of contemporary digital borders through a biopolitical lens. Against accounts that frame digital borders as immaterial, deterritorialized, or opaque “black boxes,” the article argues that border digitalization produces a multi-sited, materially grounded, and historically sedimented field of governance. Drawing on biopolitical theory the digital border is conceptualized not as a fixed line or a purely virtual apparatus, but as a distributed regime, an assemblage that differentially administers life, mobility, and time across populations. Polychōra names this regime as a variably porous, reactive spatial field in which bodies, data, infrastructures, and decisions interact across multiple loci such as checkpoints, camps, databases, algorithms, and legal sites, while retaining inscriptions that reshape subsequent modes of sorting and control. In contrast to the Platonic–Derridean notion of chōra as an impassive receptacle, polychōra foregrounds inscription, memory, and path-dependency: each act of biometric capture, risk scoring, or temporal regulation recalibrates the spatial mesh through which future mobilities are governed. By situating digital border infrastructures within biopolitical processes of population management, pre-emptive governance, and differential temporalization, the article shows how borders operate as technologies of life rather than mere instruments of exclusion. The production of multiple temporalities through risk assessments, visa regimes, and selective surveillance, emerges as central to biopolitical bordering, sorting subjects into categories of acceleration, suspension, or abandonment. Polychōra thus captures the co-production of space, time, and subjectivity in digital border assemblages, offering a conceptual framework that reconciles materiality with dispersion, and sovereignty with algorithmic governance. In doing so, it reframes the digital border as a historically contingent, biopolitical infrastructure that persistently remakes the conditions under which movement, belonging, and life itself are governed.