The Digital Transformation Of The European Border Regime

This book offers an in-depth investigation into the digitisation processes of Europe’s border regime. It shows how sociotechnical imaginations of future borders drive forward the expansion of databases in the European governance of mobility. With a focus on the European Union Agency eu-LISA, one of the most significant and rapidly advancing actors in the digital border regime, the book serves as a gateway to understanding the key agents, visions, technologies and practices at work. Asking broader questions about exclusion, discrimination, violence and mobility rights, this is an original contribution to our understanding of future borders in Europe.

This work analyses the emergent European border surveillance regime as part of the European border regime/migratory regime and the power structures this technologogical regime is embedded into, is reproducing and creating. The history, politics, policies and technological characteristics of the border surveillance regime of the EU are analysed through a theoretical framework based in political science, political sociology and surveillance studies.

This book examines the contribution of the European Commission to the process of transformation of EU borders. Migration issues have been at the centre of EU political debates in recent years. From national controversies sparked by the economic difficulties in the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn to EU-wide problems caused by the record number of asylum seekers looking for a refuge in the Union. Simultaneously, the EU migration regime has undergone a profound change since the 1980s as a result of the developments in the integration process. Inevitably this has impacted borders, transforming their nature and functions. The author looks at four key EU policy areas, which in recent decades have substantially altered the EU migration regime: the European Neighbourhood Policy, social policy, border controls, and free movement of people. Based on a variety of Commission documents the analysis focuses on the different borders that have been transformed, their altered nature and functions, and the specific impact of the European Commission on to these processes.

This book looks at how Europe's refugee crisis has provoked different political and humanitarian responses, all similarly driven by technology. The author first explores the transformation of Europe into an increasingly militarised space, where technologies are mainly used to exercise surveillance and to distinguish between citizens and unwanted migrants. She then shifts the attention to refugees' practices of connectivity by looking at how technologies are used by refugees to communicate, perform and resist their exile. Finally, the book examines the opportunities and challenges that characterise the impact of digital social innovation in humanitarian settings. By focusing on how technologies are used to promote solidarity in crisis contexts, the volume provides an original contribution to studying the role of tech for good activism within the space of Fortress Europe. Based on interviews with refugees, digital humanitarians and social entrepreneurs, the book timely questions what Europe means today, and why dialogue is now more important than ever. Sara Marino is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. She is the author of L'ebbrezza del potere: Vittime e persecutori (2009), editor of Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Trajectories on Pluralism, Inclusion and Citizenship (2014) and co-editor of Fortress Europe: Media, Migration and Borders (with Simon Dawes, 2016). She serves as Editorial Board Member for the Media Theory journal.

How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration? As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. This is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future.

The Migration Mobile offers an account of the very different technologies implicated in border crossing and migration management. Borders have been sites of contestations and struggles over who belongs and who does not, who is and is not allowed to move freely in transnational or national spaces. Embedded as they are in the bordering process, policing and security practices produce the irregularity and illegitimacy of the migrating subject. At the same time, border practices simultaneously imply processes of dissidence and resistance. Border infrastructures and resistance to bordering practices refer to dynamic and complex interactions between migrants and non-human others, technologies at the borderland and elsewhere. Border guards, EU officials, Frontex officers, activists, NGOs and solidarity networks configure both hybrid alliances of humans/nonhumans and new virtual and urban spaces in order to enforce or resist bordering. Through analyses of empirical cases drawing from the European border regimes the book investigates how technologies employed by states and EU border agencies configure the border regimes; how spaces of migration are configured through uses and re-uses of high-tech technologies; and finally on how the border regimes and ‘the border industrial complex’ are contested reconfigured by the use of ICT by migrants and solidarity networks.

In the light of mass migration, the rise of nationalism and the resurgence of global terrorism, this timely volume brings the debate on border protection, security and control to the centre stage of international relations research. Rather than analysing borders as mere lines of territorial demarcation in a geopolitical sense, it sheds new light on their changing role in defining and negotiating identity, authority, security, and social and economic differences. Bringing together innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives, the book examines the nexus of authority, society, technology and culture, while also providing in-depth analyses of current international conflicts. Regional case studies comprise the Ukraine crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh, the emergence of new territorial entities such as ISIS, and maritime disputes in the South China Sea, as well as the contestation and re-construction of borders in the context of transnational movements. Bringing together theoretical, empirical and conceptual contributions by international scholars, this Yearbook of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs offers novel perspectives on hotly debated issues in contemporary politics, and will be of interest to researchers, graduate students and political decision makers alike.

Recent debates on migration have demonstrated the important role of concepts in academic and political discourse. The contributions to this collection revisit established analytical categories in the study of migration such as border regimes, orders of belonging, coloniality, translation, trans/national digital culture and memory. Exploring notions, images and realities of migration in their cultural framings, this volume sheds light on the powerful work of these concepts. Including perspectives on migration from history, visual studies, pedagogy, literary and cultural studies, cultural anthropology and sociology, it explores the complex scholarly and popular notions of migration with particular focus on their often unspoken assumptions and political implications. Revisiting established analytical tools in the study of migration, the interdisciplinary contributions explore new approaches and point to the importance of conceptual nuance extending beyond academic discourse.