Surveillance of Migrants, Construction Workers and Patients under COVID-19: New Technologies on Guard of “Dangerous Classes”

Abstract

Surveillance research is more than seven decades old, but this area has not yet attracted the attention of the scientific community in Russia. At the same time, surveillance technologies in the country are developing rapidly, having a significant impact on social processes and relations. This article seeks to contribute to the Russian academic discourse on surveillance. It focuses on a particular surveillance technology that, while originally aimed at the commercial realm, has moved into the realm of public–private partnerships and has rapidly evolved beyond what it was designed for. The concept of social sorting proposed by David Lyon is chosen as the main theoretical approach for the analysis of the empirical material. It also uses Guy Standing’s concept of the precariat, and Malcolm M. Feely and Jonathan Simon’s concept of the new penology. It is concluded that the studied surveillance technology is focused on preventing risky situations that may occur in the future (violations of labor discipline, the spread of coronavirus infection, or the non-compliance with Russian legislation and ignoring constitutionally significant values). Surveillance-targeting is driven by perceptions of a heightened risk posed by a range of populations in the context of these situations, and can be explained by referring to the concept of “dangerous classes”. Unlike the results obtained in a number of other works, this study shows that the surveillance technology considered does not lead to the complete exclusion of targeted categories of the population from the social space while performing the traditional function of disciplining the supervised and maximizing profits.