Absent Tech: Data, Violence and (Non)Credibility at the EU Borders

Abstract

The digitisation of borders has permeated academic and political debates, the image of ‘digital fortress Europe’ becoming normalised and taken for granted. This ‘taken for grantedness’, however, clashes with the reality on the ground and has important implications for migrants' rights and credibility. This paper seeks to supplement accounts that foreground the assumed omnipresence of digital technologies with an analysis of their concomitant absence. Drawing on fieldwork in Italy, it demonstrates how the discourse around digital borders sustains states' ‘epistemic borderwork’ and erases migrants' knowledge and rights claims. Overall, the paper reflects on which technologies are made absent and present at the EU borders, and how both absence and presence are imbricated in power relations that enable new forms of violence and reactivate legacies of subordination and domination.