The governmentalisation of personal digital archives in asylum procedures

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3608670
AutoresIvan Josipovic (0000-0002-4404-3980, University of Vienna, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen51
Número17
Páginas4483-4501
Fecha de publicación2025-10-21
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaNew Community (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2025.2492350
OpenAlexW4410718903
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas44

Asylum bureaucracies in Europe are undergoing processes of digitalisation, including the use of new digital data sources to inform decision-making in refugee status determination. The extraction of asylum seekers’ smartphone data, based on new policies across Europe, testifies to an intensified struggle for epistemic authority and reignites questions about the politics of knowledge production. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it demonstrates that the governmentalisation of digital archives predates formal policies for smartphone examinations. Drawing on empirical data from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, including court files, policy documents and expert interviews, the paper identifies the epistemic strategies deployed by asylum decision-makers in relation to smartphone data and discusses (dis)continuities in relation to the new policy-based procedures. Second, the article contributes to the literature on the politics of knowledge production in asylum governance by placing the findings into the context of Foucauldian governmentality studies. I argue that while the governmentalisation of personal digital archives reinforces well-established insecuritisation processes in asylum, it critically relies on a novel form of power, namely what Isin and Ruppert call ‘sensory power’

Criminology · Internet privacy · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · Data Analysis and Archiving · Education, Healthcare and Sociology Research · History