The skype state: digital pushbacks and the absence of asylum on mainland Greece

Thesis

States and supernational actors increasingly deploy digital technologies within projects of border enforcement and migration management. This doctoral dissertation focuses on the deployment of Skype video technology within the mainland Greek asylum procedure. Between 2014 and 2022, the majority of asylum applicants on mainland Greece (and some islands) were required to initiate their asylum procedures by calling the Greek Asylum Service on Skype. Skype played a dominant role in the governance of asylum applicants in Greece for approximately eight years, but existing scholarship has not ethnographically explored the digital bureaucratic procedure. Approaching the Skype procedure as a border technology, this dissertation ethnographically explores the experience and embodiment of digital bordering while considering what kind of political events are enabled by the insertion of mundane digital technology within bordering projects.

Building upon fieldwork in Athens, Greece, I demonstrate that the Skype procedure is a powerful tool of internal bordering. I argue that digital bureaucracy can be used as a political technology whose bordering power operates not at the physical border but in the body and minds of asylum applicants.

By directing physical queues to a digital pathway, Greece disappears asylum applicants, distances the state from those seeking to make claims upon it, and makes life unlivable. In doing so, it executes what I conceptualize as a digital pushback, which refers to the digitally mediated strategies governments employ to erase unwanted populations from public space and the realm of state responsibility. In the Greek case, this pushback operates through affective violence and exclusion, shaping alienating waiting events that condition migrant life into exhaustion and confinement. At the same time, the distance and obscurity of digital bureaucracy legitimizes state absence and muddles understandings of power. The digitalization of bureaucratic systems can alter the (non)citizen-state interaction in violent and surreal ways.

Authors: Damianos, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-v0z648kbo
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: Asylum, Right of; digital