The Coloniality of Power in Techno-borderscapes

Digital technologies are increasingly used by different social actors for different purposes, including migration management and border governance, humanitarian assistance, and resistance and solidarity. Along “smart borders,” drones are used to monitor crossings while, after crossing, people on the move are required to provide their fingerprints, which are stored in databases accessible across national borders. Refugees living in camps are subjected to iris recognition as a prerequisite for accessing humanitarian aid while international organizations collect and store the biometric information of those seeking protection. Activists engage in counter-border strategies and promote transnational migrant solidarity through digital platforms. Marie Godin and I introduced the term “techno-borderscapes” to describe these digitally mediated encounters, contestations, and disruptions among migrant and non-migrant subjectivities at borders. Techno-borderscapes are not neutral spaces but sites of contestation, struggles, and negotiations.

The proliferation of digital technologies for migration management, border governance, and humanitarian assistance is innovative and future-oriented. Yet, this hides continuities with the past that reproduce colonial relations. Aníbal Quijano uses the term “coloniality of power” to capture the living legacy of colonialism in forms of social discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. Unpacking colonialism and its living legacy is key to understanding the relationship between migration, borders, and technological innovations. An examination of interconnected processes reveals how the coloniality of power operates in techno-borderscapes.

Data Colonialism: Biometric Categorizations and Hierarchical Social Orders

The use of biometrics—computer-based identification systems of persons by physiological characteristics—is one of the central tools used for migration management, governance, and humanitarianism. Systems such as the United Kingdom’s Biometric Residence Permit, Entry/Exit System, and Automated Fingerprint Identification cross the border from the “bio”—migrants’ lives—to the “metrics”—the inorganic signifier. The genealogy of biometrics can be traced to the colonial project when fingerprinting was first tested on British subjects in India. The systematic counting of bodies under colonial rule in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia is reinscribed in the arrangement of biometric information collected from racialized and gendered subjects, many fleeing from countries with colonial histories. The production of biometric categories and the formation of social hierarchies through information flows speaks of data colonialism.

Like the colonial project of counting, categorizing, creating hierarchies, and normalizing difference between colonized and colonizers, data colonialism generates biometric data to order and segregate racialized and gendered subjects across time and spaces. The binary of colonizer and colonized is reproduced through that of citizen and non-citizen or of legal and illegal migrant. Difference becomes normalized through “risk and racial profiling” that separates deserving and undeserving migrants. Under the justification of administrative expediency and the uncritical assumption of algorithmic neutrality, biometrics are anthropomorphized to be arbiters of who has the right to cross borders, which rights a person is entitled to, and what resources an individual is allowed to access.

Neocolonial Engagements: States, Humanitarians, and Tech Companies

The coloniality of power operates in techno-borderscapes through neocolonial engagements and allegiances. During colonial times, a range of actors worked together to govern, exploit, and control the colonized. In addition to colonial administrators and political representatives, other actors ranging from traders (for example, the East India Company) to missionaries contributed to maintaining asymmetrical power relations. Today, similarly, conventional actors like states and humanitarian agencies forge new partnerships with tech companies, defense-industry providers, and private businesses. The resulting shifting alliances and loyalties reproduce neocolonial engagements.

The work of the  World Food Programme (WFP) in Yemen offers an example of the ways in which the coloniality of power operates through new neocolonial engagements. The organization has been criticized for striking a partnership with Palantir, a software private company with a dubious human rights track record. In June 2019, the WFP issued an ultimatum to the Houthi movement in Yemen to participate in its biometric identification system or receive less aid. Resisting this neocolonial project, the Houthis chose a partial stoppage of aid, accusing the WFP of being a surveillance operation and critiquing its “data” governance.

Data Exploitation, Extraction, and Accumulation

Whereas minerals and spices were precious goods during colonial times, data is the new treasured commodity. Data mining has replaced mineral mining. Data is the new gold that is extracted and accumulated, sold for profit, or exchanged for gain. Often under some form of coercion, refugees in camps and migrants crossing borders are required to have their fingerprints taken or iris identified. Tech companies are tasked by states and humanitarian actors to collect and store this valuable resource. The lives of migrants and refugees are transformed into a commodity. Data colonialism occurs where value is extracted from this data for the benefit of various stakeholders.

Biometrics can be commodified and shared in ways that go against the interests of the givers. In the United Kingdom, for instance, personal data collected by the National Health Service from migrants accessing healthcare can be disclosed to the Home Office and can result in deportations or detention of non-citizens. Data colonialism operates under the guise of giving while taking away. Biometric information has become part and parcel of the neoliberal project where people’s misery subsidizes the accumulation of capital.

Modernity and Techno-colonialism

Digital technologies are usually celebrated by states for efficient border surveillance, by humanitarian agencies under the rubric of “tech for good,” and by activists for their mobilizing force. Despite criticism of their fallibilities or of risks in techno-borderscapes, they are here to stay. Their often uncritical celebration does not emerge from nor exists in a vacuum. It is embedded in Western modernity, with its appreciation of science, individualism, and innovations.

In the past, colonial narratives of progress privileged the power of the colonizers at the expense of the colonized. The fascination with progress obscured the dark side of modernity—the suffering and exploitation of colonial subjects and the price paid for the benefit of the colonizers. Similarly, techno-colonialism is a value system entrenched in Western modernity that in the name of progress uncritically justifies the conversion of bio into metrics. This leaves unquestioned the novel centrality of the for-profit tech sector in traditional not-for-profit spheres and fails to challenge the data mining and exploitation of the suffering of migrants and refugees. It shies away from its dark side.

Thus, to unpack the ways in which the coloniality of power operates in techno-borderscapes is key to achieving a more balanced imaginary of the relationship between migration, borders, and technological innovations.

This essay is an extract from the keynote “Migration Management, Borders and Digital Technologies: The Coloniality of Power in Techno-borderscapes,” presented at the conference Digitized Migrants that the IWM/CRG Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration organized in Turkey in September 2022.

Giorgia Donà is professor of forced migration and refugee studies and co-director of the research Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging at the University of East London, United Kingdom. She was a visiting fellow at the IWM in 2021.