Mediating the Refugee Crisis

Digital Solidarity, Humanitarian Technologies and Border Regimes

Sara Marino

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030535629
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030535636
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biblioteconomía y ciencia de la información

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.

© The Author(s) 2021

S. MarinoMediating the Refugee Crisishttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53563-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Mediating the ‘Refugee Crisis’: An Introduction

Sara Marino¹

(1)

Media School, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK

The analysis offered in this book uses the term ‘refugee crisis’ within quotes to indicate how problematic this term is. While the term has been used to predominantly indicate a crisis of migration and a crisis of numbers, the way European governments have responded to such ‘crisis’ suggests instead that what we are witnessing is a crisis of European borders, a crisis of solidarity and a crisis of hospitality. The use of the terms ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ in this context is also problematic. In this chapter, I use both terms as the analysis takes into account the more politicised uses of migrants as illegal migrants and of refugees as asylum seekers. Over the course of this book, I shall mainly use the term ‘refugee’. While I recognise the term’s epistemological and ontological complexity, alternative uses also pose problems. The term migrant, for example, deeply undermines the differences that exist between voluntary and forced migrants. The term asylum seeker, on the other hand, calls into question their view as opportunistic agents claiming benefits.

End Abstract

As I began writing this book in 2017, the number of people forcibly displaced as a result of the Syrian Civil War continued to represent one of the most pressing political issues in the mass-mediated public discourse across and beyond Europe. Unanimously labelled as a ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’ crisis, the predominant narratives circulating offline and online were overflowing with references to the collapse of Europe’s institutions and values, and a fear that life as we knew it was about to end under the push of uninvited strangers. The ‘crisis’ appeared to be mainly discussed as an emergency concerning the management of migration along Europe’s outer borders and thus mainly requiring military interventions able to contain and suppress a largely unwanted migration. In reality, however, a closer look at the inflections of Europe’s global mobility regime (De Genova 2017) suggested that, far from being exceptional measures addressing a situation of emergency, the reintroduction and reinforcement of border controls were in fact calling into question the very concept of Europe as a stable political, social and humanitarian project.

This book deals with the technological mediations of Europe’s political and humanitarian response to the ongoing ‘crisis’ that has currently entered its tenth year since the start of the conflict. The reasons for focusing on technologies as key conceptual framework are threefold. Firstly, my interest in the role that technologies have played in mediating the ‘refugee crisis’ originates from the fact that mediated practices and discourses have been central to the way European governments have elaborated, communicated and intervened on the ongoing influx of migrants and refugees. Second, technologies have been instrumental in the way migrants and refugees have connected, more or less successfully, with Europe’s mobility infrastructures and services. Third, information and communication technologies have fundamentally shaped the way humanitarian organisations, activists and citizens have responded to the political and moral absenteeism of the Union’s member states in an attempt to promote the legal and moral duty to safeguard human life. In considering these aspects, the book recognises the European border space as a communicative entity shaped by a performative network of technologies used to exercise, resist and contest sovereign power in both material and symbolic ways.

Theoretically, the analysis presented in this book engages with three lines of enquiry that are strongly interrelated. The first strand of scholarship discusses the tension between humanitarianism and securitisation that has characterised the governance of forced migration and border policing since the ‘crisis’ in 2015 became a cause of concern in the European political and public space. The first indications that a ‘tragedy of epic proportions’¹ was unfolding at Europe’s outer borders occurred in the aftermath of what was classified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as the deadliest shipwreck ever recorded in the Mediterranean Sea.² In April 2015, an overcrowded vessel capsized in Libyan waters south of the Italian island of Lampedusa killing more than eight hundred migrants and refugees. Only twenty-eight survivors were rescued and brought to Italy, where the scale and horror came into even sharper focus in the immediate days following the tragedy. Rage spread across Italy and the then Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, encouraged member states to collectively share the responsibility for a crisis concerning the Union in its entirety. When interviewed on possible courses of action, Renzi suggested that human traffickers—‘whom he repeatedly compared to slave traders’³ (The Guardian 2015)—had come to represent the key target of Europe’s migration response.

From this point onwards, and in response to the increasing number of migrants and refugees fleeing war in 2015 and 2016, the governance of migration seemed to oscillate between two main reactions. One was to strengthen the EU internal and external borders in order ‘to manage migration more effectively and protect the internal freedom of movement within the Schengen area’.⁴ A second approach was designed to protect the lives of refugees and migrants by identifying and eradicating the activities of people traffickers. Within this scenario, while the UNHCR encouraged the Union to move beyond border enforcement to consider instead longer-term solutions such as more robust search and rescue operations, resettlement schemes and the provision of legal and safer alternatives to prevent migrants from resorting to smugglers,⁵ the European Commission proceeded quite differently.

In defining Europe’s external borders as a shared responsibility, European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans identified the creation of an integrated system of border management as a strategic resource for the identification of weaknesses and for the delivery of more efficient solutions to the geopolitical pressures exercised by the ‘refugee crisis’. In reiterating this position, European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos, discussed the need for a new ‘Border Package’ as a response to citizens’ demands for more security and the need for higher standards of border management.⁶ Both positions made very clear that the united front against migration mainly consisted of a ‘politics of containment’ (Garelli and Tazzioli 2019). The paradox that Aas and Gundhus (2015) identify as the incongruity between care, the protection of migrants from smugglers and citizens’ safety, and control, the fortification of policies that make migrating even more precarious (De Genova 2017), is well reflected in the transformation of borders into a sophisticated techno-mediated architecture of territorial sovereign power. This represents one of the key arguments of this book.

The second strand of literature that this book engages with builds upon the link that is being made between the securitisation, humanitarianisation and militarisation of borders to emphasise the extent to which top-down governmental bordering strategies adopted by state authorities increasingly rely on digital technologies. The contemporary European migration regime is datafied and digitalised (Leurs and Smets 2018). Europe’s techno-mediated infrastructure and architecture of power increasingly rely on an ‘assemblage’ (Madianou 2019) consisting of biometric registrations, artificially intelligent border systems, predictive analytics of social media activity, surveillance cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) designed to identify, monitor and control migratory routes and individuals.

In this respect, the transformation of Europe into a cyber Fortress (Guild et al. 2008) has proceeded gradually but steadily. Since 2016, when Frontex—the European Border and Coast Guard Agency—was established,⁷ the protection of the EU’s external borders has continuously justified major increases in funding. A new integrated border management fund was identified as a priority for the EU 2021–2027 budget, where the funding for migration and border management was almost tripled.⁸ The new fund, which is designed to support the deployment of state-of-the-art IT equipment for the identification of smugglers and for the delivery of search and rescue operations, justifies once again the need for more border guards to be ‘activated’ in emergency situations.

Within this scenario, the delivery of search and rescue operations should be contextualised within the hyper-militarisation and technologisation of borders. This became painfully clear in 2014 when Operation Mare Nostrum, the search and rescue project led by the Italian Coast Guard, was replaced by the Frontex-led Operation Triton. The decision was met with mixed reactions over concerns that the more limited Frontex mission would have prioritised discouraging migrants from crossing the sea rather than supporting rescue operations (Andersson 2017). Both examples, however, speak of the convergence of two trends: on the one hand, the interplay of military and humanitarian ideologies as a justification for the adoption of force against the bodies of migrants; and, on the other hand, the militarisation of search and rescue operations signals the criminalisation of humanitarian assistance as facilitating the illegal arrival of refugees and migrants. Quite exemplary is the case of the search and rescue ship Aquarius which in 2018 became the object of an international dispute between Italy and Malta over who was responsible for allowing the ship to dock at their ports. The ship carrying 629 migrants was stranded off the coast of Libya and was left in a political impasse when both Malta and Italy refused to let the ship disembark on their shores. Under the hashtag #chiudiamoiporti (we are shutting the ports), Italy’s then deputy prime minister and leader of the right-wing Lega party, Matteo Salvini, celebrated Italy’s victory over its ‘no’ to human trafficking and illegal immigration. Using this event as a symbol of Italy’s renewed territorial sovereign...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Mediating the ‘Refugee Crisis’: An Introduction
• 2. The Foundations of Fortress Europe
• 3. Technologies of Surveillance and Border Regimes
• 4. Technologies in/of Exile
• 5. Technologies of Solidarity
• 6. Digital Solidarity, Humanitarian Technologies, Border Regimes Concluding Notes
• Back Matter