This session brings a fresh collaboration with the COST Action “Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges of European Migration and Border Control (DATAMIG)”. DATAMIG is an interdisciplinary network aimed at fostering research by bridging spheres of discourse and public intervention surrounding data issues in European migration and border control.

DATAMIG Working Group 1 is currently working on a collaborative book titled "Migration Data Matters: A Keyword Approach to the Datafication of Migration and Border Control". In this project, scholars have come together to develop an inventory of critical scholarship through keyword-based chapters. These keywords, written by multi-author teams, highlight significant themes related to the digitalisation and datafication of migration, mobilities, and borders.

In our upcoming Circle, we will focus on the following chapters:

“Technologies on the Move” by Andrés Pereira and Sara Bellezza

With technologies on the move, we propose a concept that refers to the assemblage of ideas, techniques, objects, experts, legal frameworks, practices and models of migration control that accompany the circulation of technologies in multi-directional ways. Technologies on the move comprises a research agenda that includes externalization and circulation of bordering technologies from the centers to the periphery, but also contests this unidirectional viewpoint by putting emphasis on the circularity of the movement of technologies, from the peripheries to the centers. In line with the autonomy of migration, technologies on the move considers practices of appropriation and strategic interaction with technologies to facilitate movement against global (im)mobility regimes. As such, the movement of technologies is inextricably linked to the movement of migration across borders: the circulation of technologies is preceded by the movement and the strategic use of technologies by migrants, but also furthers movement when border deterrence mechanisms threaten to hinder circular mobility. This keyword intends to constitute new decentered views on the contested circulation of migratory control by investigating externalization processes of bordering technologies, south-south cooperations, the constitution of regional and global technological zones, the diffusion and hybridization of technologies and legal frameworks through international organizations and the export and import or expansion of techno-humanitarian regimes, for example for the extraction of data. From above to below, from the peripheries to the centers, and vice versa, technologies on the move is an approach that highlights the colonial and unequal power relations across the borders.

“Accountability” by Alice Fill, Ismini Mathioudaki, and Annalisa Meloni

Accountability is a concept that integrates various disciplines, including legal studies, international relations, and philosophy. At its core, it can be understood as a relationship among actors. The process of datafication in migration and border management is profoundly altering how this relationship is conceived, mediated, and connected to justice. This entry proposes utilising accountability as a lens to examine how responsibilities arising from both positive and negative obligations in the field of migration are becoming blurred and negotiated, encompassing both legal and extra-legal concerns. In particular, this analysis begins by mapping accountability voids and frictions that emerge from the digitalisation of migration and border governance, within, at, and before the EU borders. Specifically, it highlights how claims of accountability are shifting among human and non-human actors, national and international entities, agencies, and between the EU and third countries. This shift results in the disentanglement of violations or decisions from the responsibility for them.
Accountability in the field of European migration, asylum, and border control policies is a pressing issue, particularly in the context of the many tragedies involving migrants who die attempting to reach the European border. While certain sections of civil society and scholarship have extensively articulated and documented how the EU and its Member States are implicated in this reality, the prevailing political discourse blames smugglers, criminalised NGOs, migrants themselves, and hostile third countries. Moreover, externalisation policies, accelerated border procedures, and deterrence mechanisms are specifically designed to evade accountability and jurisdiction under European and international human rights law, largely deflecting responsibilities for violations. To discuss these issues, three exemplary cases are presented: the automation of decision-making in migration and asylum procedures, the interoperability among EU databases and other information-sharing schemes, and the consequences of datafication in a context of increasing externalisation, characterised by a pre-emptive approach. Datafication in the field of migration has the potential to further degrade the rule of law in this domain, leading to serious and systematic breaches of the fundamental rights of migrants that are non-imputable or unaddressed. This situation partly stems from the vulnerable position of migrants in law, reflecting their categorisation as ‘other’, which urgently needs to be rethought if human rights are to be taken seriously.

“Data Protection” by Iwan Oostrom, Rocco Bellanova, and Gloria Gonzalez Fuster

Amidst the rapid evolution of personal data protection law, particularly within the European Union (EU), data protection has become key to the shaping and framing of the increasingly data-driven border and migration policies and technologies, as well as their associated controversies and contestations. In this entry, we shed light on the meaning of data protection and the ways in which it may intertwine with borders and migration. First, we outline data protection’s historical development, from its emergence as a concern in 1960s Europe, to its elevation to an EU fundamental right separated from privacy in 2000, followed by the more recent advancements of data protection law in Europe and beyond. While offering this account, we reflect on the substance of data protection, considering its complex, evolving and contested relationship to the right to the protection of private life. This is followed by a brief overview of the key elements of the EU’s data protection governance framework. We relay some of the opportunities, challenges, and criticism that have been voiced over the capacity of data protection and its governance to safeguard the rights of people on the move. Furthermore, we introduce several key data protection principles, such as lawfulness,fairness and transparency, purpose limitation, and accuracy, while offering accounts of how these principles have been mobilised in migration-related court cases, academic research and civil society campaigns. Finally, this entry reflects on how data protection, as both an object of research and an epistemic tool, may offer novel research avenues for critical border, migration and security studies.

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Online with Samuel Singler, Lecturer in Criminology in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Essex.

This paper adds an ideological dimension to the burgeoning literature examining how new digital tools developed by private technology companies are reshaping the relationship between border control and criminal justice. By analyzing private technology companies’ promotional materials, public events, presentations to state actors, and technical documentation in the African contexts, I address the question: what is the role of private technology companies in constructing future visions of border control, and to what extent do these future visions involve a merging of border control with criminal justice practices in Africa?

Although references to a biometric ‘imaginary’ or ‘ideal’ are quickly becoming commonplace in the critical literature on digital border controls, researchers have spent less time inquiring into where such imaginaries come from, and which actors create and shape these visions of the future. I argue that these companies can be productively conceptualized as ‘surveillance evangelists’ akin to the ‘moral entrepreneurs’ familiar to critical criminologists. The notion of surveillance evangelism explains how technical actors deal with the potential dissonance between utopian visions of a future biometric world on one hand, and the reality of technical failures, messy practices, and political challenges to these technologies on the other hand. Moreover, the term highlights how these companies do not only attempt to convince potential customers of the desirability of their already existing products. As evangelists, these companies also attempt to convert public authorities into believers of a particular biometric future by pre-empting potential challenges and closing off alternative visions of future surveillance practices.

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Online with Alizée Dauchy, Post-doctoral Researcher in International Studies, University of Trento.

In the context of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, Niger has been actively committed to migration control in West Africa. To enable better comprehension of the making of security in Niger, the article “Dreaming Biometrics” studies the implementation of three biometric system (Wapis, Midas and Bims) under the EU Trust Fund by international agencies (Interpol, the International Organization for Migration, and the UNHCR) and national actors. Drawing on in-depth interviews, observation at the border and anthropology of aid studies, I focus on heterogeneous actors’ situated discourses and practices to demonstrate that they do not share the same dream about biometrics.

            The article, as a first attempt to fill the “empirical gap between discourse of biometric capability and operational realities” (Singler 2021), outlines the need to move away from the rhetoric of regional and international organisations, states and private actors on digital innovation and to look at how technology is (not) implemented at the border. Studying the materialities of the borderscape means to focus on interaction more than properties as a methodological starting point for the research (Fischer 2018). By doing so, this presentation outlines the importance of the social and geographical contexts in which security devices are deployed and how it shapes or constrains the deployment of these systems and invites to escape also from a certain techno-hype or techno determinism in the Global South.

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Online with Philippa Metcalfe, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick.

Drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in the UK and Greece, Philippa conceptualises (dys)functional data infrastructures as a tool through which opaque policy outcomes are achieved; used to dispossess illegalised migrants of basic rights after they have crossed the external borders of Europe, whilst also becoming a means of legitimising ongoing investment in technological systems which serve to benefit private interests. Through doing so, she explores what is at stake when we discuss the harms of datafied borders. She discusses the use of Skype in Greece, which was in operation until 2021 and presented as a practical tool for registering asylum claims, as well as the MESH data infrastructure used in the British healthcare system where personal data are shared between the NHS and the Home Office, presented as a means of enforcing chargeability checks. In both instances, the technological infrastructure seemingly failed to fulfil the stated policy purpose of offering a practical way to apply for asylum or recouping healthcare costs. Instead, in Greece, many found the Skype system became a barrier to accessing asylum, and in the UK, people became wary of accessing healthcare over fears of becoming visible to the Home Office and consequently detained. Whilst borders are themselves a “tool in a global order predicated on colonial and racial forms of (dis)possession” (Brito 2023, 10), through focusing on the exclusionary and colonial logics that underpin asylum and immigration policies in Europe (El-Enany 2020; Squire 2009), Philippa draws on a framework of dispossession to conceptualise how datafication “creates the conditions for a new apparatus of racialised dispossession” (Gray 2023, 3) through (dys)functional technological systems. She argues that the (dys)functionality of these infrastructures is intrinsic to fulfilling harmful policies in a way that distances the state from enacting violence, thus avoiding a level of public scrutiny. Finally, Philippa argues that this simultaneously legitimises further development of these technologies, where the use of datafied controls is never questioned, but rather corporate actors position themselves as experts who can fettle and fine tune (dys)functional technological systems.

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Online with Petra Molnar, co-creator of the Migration and Tech Monitor, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University, and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Technological experiments play up an ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’ mentality at the centre of migration management policy. Border spaces serve as testing grounds for new technologies, places where regulation is deliberately limited and where an ‘anything goes’ frontier attitude informs the development and deployment of surveillance at the expense of people’s lives. Unbridled techno-solutionism and migration surveillance exacerbates deterrence mechanisms already so deeply embedded in the global migration management strategy, like at the Polish Belarusian border, making things as difficult for people to set an example and to prevent others from coming. This paper is based on ethnographic on-the-ground research at various borders, drawing on vignettes from Poland/Belarus, the Aegean Islands of Greece, and the US-Mexico border. Coupled with a human rights-based approach to analysing the far-reaching human impacts of surveillance and automation at the border, it argues that an increasingly global and lucrative panopticon of migration control exacerbates discrimination and obfuscates responsibility and liability through the development and deployment of increasingly hardline border technologies, once again reifying the vast power differentials between those who move and those who make decisions about how to ‘manage’ migration.

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