The Digital Border

Abstract

As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states step up their border controls. 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 of migration 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 control the narratives of migration as “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants use digital platforms to 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, Chouliaraki and Georgiou develop a holistic theory of the digital border as an 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 and violence but also care and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; and traversed by fragile social relationships that entail both the despair or inhumanity and the promise of a better future.