Europe’s Datafied Borders

This monograph examines the growing datafication of European borders, exploring how digital technologies reshape migration governance. The book reveals how such technologies increasingly function as tools of exclusion, surveillance, and control for those whose mobility rights are restricted – including people seeking asylum and illegalised migrants. As such, the book explores the datafied element of enforcing the exclusionary logics that underpin migration policies in Europe.Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and the United Kingdom, the book foregrounds the lived experiences of those navigating datafied systems. It traces how digital infrastructures reshape access to rights and everyday life. Conceptually, the book identifies key manifestations of power within datafied borders: control through categorisation and identification, containment through everyday surveillance, and dispossession of rights through data infrastructures. Situating these processes within histories of colonial and racialised border control, the book challenges solutions that focus on the technology itself, highlighting the structural injustices embedded in datafied migration governance.The book will be of interest to scholars and students across migration studies, critical border studies, critical data studies, surveillance studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, and politics. It will also appeal to policymakers, activists, and civil society organisations working on migration, mobility rights, and digital justice.

Philippa Metcalfe is a Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. She previously completed her PhD at Cardiff University’s Data Justice Lab as part of the ERC-funded DATAJUSTICE project. Her research examines the politics of datafication, with a particular focus on the human impact of border technologies and digital surveillance. Her work has been published in Geopolitics, First Monday, and International Political Sociology. Alongside her academic work, she is involved in a number of self-organised projects that work to challenge the state violence of borders.