Technology and Forced Migration: Ukrainian Migrants in Central and Eastern Europe. By E.Ślęzak‐Belowska, M.Jelínková, A.Bielewska, and K.Amit (eds.), Taylor & Francis, 2025. 167 pp (hardcover). ISBN: 978‐1‐03‐285876‐0

Russia's aggression against Ukraine, which began in February of 2022, has, according to the UNHCR, resulted in 3.7 million internally displaced people in Ukraine and another 6.9 million refugees who have fled that country as of February 2025. As one would expect, many of those who have fled Ukraine have entered neighbouring Eastern European countries, with Poland accepting the largest number, roughly one million. That the war has been protracted has allowed social scientists over the past 3 years to study in detail various aspects of this dire example of forced migration and the numerous roles played by the migrants and governments, publics, NGOs, and businesses in the countries of refuge. One of the results of this research effort is Technology and Forced Migration: Ukrainian Migrants in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Ewa Ślęzak-Belowska, Marie Jelínková, Agnieszka Bielewska, and Karin Amit. This is a book with a great amount of detail offered for each of the reception countries it covers: Poland, Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia, as well as timely and pertinent information about the European Union's response. In some ways, details aside, this is a well-known story of refugees fleeing their homeland as it was attacked and neighbouring countries offering them safety. But it is much more than this familiar story. Interestingly, the four countries had previously been cautious regarding immigration, and in some cases hostile to it. But a fascinating thing happened due to the cultural allegiances between Ukraine and these CEE countries and their reactions in support of the victim of this aggression, Ukraine, even in Hungary, which under the Orban regime had previously been relatively sympathetic to Russia. This having been noted, the most interesting aspect and the main analytical contribution of this book is the attention that the respective authors pay to information and communications technologies (ICTs) in this story of flight and resettlement. Although ICTs have featured in many recent studies of migration and integration, rarely have academic researchers had such an opportunity to study how migration in different respects has been affected by this technology. The different respects include how the fleeing migrants relied upon ICTs, most prominently smartphones; how governments took advantage of ICTs to support the migrants as well as to maintain a form of management over these flows of people across their borders; how civil society organisations used these technologies to support the migrants arriving in their communities; and how technology companies, particularly internet and cell phone service providers, joined the effort to manage these migration flows for the benefit of all sides. This book is an all-too-rare example of an edited academic volume that is unified and coherent. It is not simply a collection of essays loosely tied to a title but a robust linear treatment of a well-defined theme. The editors are to be commended for how they managed their team of authors to ensure a rational flow to the essays and with a clear purpose to the publication. So often edited volumes seem to have as their purpose little beyond supporting academic CVs. Not this book It opens with a chapter by Ślęzak-Belowska, Jelínková, and Solano that outlines the ways that ICTs were developed and how they have come to mould our lives including the lives of people on the move. The chapter ends with a more concentrated look at the situation specifically of Ukrainian refugees, their use of ICTs back home, their overall digital literacy, and how they used ICTs during their current forced migration to Eastern Europe. This chapter is followed by Karin Amit's exploration of how Ukrainian forced migrants used ICTs in making their migration-related decisions and with an emphasis on the smartphone, which she shows to have become a near-essential piece of equipment for modern migrants in gaining the information that they needed to manage their exodus from Ukraine. Her detailed study highlights that the decisions to leave Ukraine were often taken in a tremendous hurry, something made possible by the amount of information that these technologies delivered. Some of the largely unsung heroes of the mass movement of Ukrainians to CEE countries are to be found in the private sector companies that responded rapidly to the situation by easing the quest for internet services once the migrants arrived in their country of destination. As Jelínková and Soderstrom detail, several internet service providers such as Vodaphone, Lifestar, and Kyivstar immediately offered the fleeing migrants free SIM cards, free or low-cost roaming, and other ways to make it easier for the migrants to use their smartphones and other devices to gain the information they needed once they crossed the border into another country. These companies had representatives on the ground to meet the migrants as they arrived and to assist them with their technology needs, a highly important and laudable response to this emergency. ICTs provided the governments of receiving countries with an efficient and twofold means of managing information by providing it to the incoming migrants to support them in their journeys and settlement into their new communities while collecting information about their movements to control their national borders. Bielewska, Naranovich, and Lyubashenko's chapter describes the different uses of these technologies by the respective governments to deal with the large numbers of migrants reaching their territories and the limits of their achievements. It is noteworthy, however, that the migrants took advantage of many other sources of information and did not necessarily privilege those provided by governments. In their deeper look into how different levels of government and non-state organisations used ICTs to support the migrants in settling and ultimately integrating into their new homes, Ślęzak-Belowska and Paragi reveal the complexity of co-ordinating messages provided by the many organisations involved and how each exercises its discretion in the interests of its specific jurisdiction. Among their interesting observations is how their experience of providing and managing information during the COVID pandemic helped them manage the arrival of Ukrainian migrants fleeing the war. Whereas their chapter looks at the roles of lower-level governments and NGOs, Yilmaz and Bircan take the reader higher up the governance ladder to examine the use of ICTs by the European Union's migration-related organisations, emphasising border management in the context of an emergency involving millions of arrivals in a short time. They leave little doubt that ICTs enabled a much quicker and effective response but sometimes at a significant cost to human rights and privacy. In their concluding chapter, the editors of the volume synthesise the findings and analyses of the previous chapters and offer recommendations for the consideration of authorities whether of the organisations explicitly discussed in the book or others throughout the world. Theirs is an important and well-edited book that taught this reviewer a great deal and left him wanting to learn more. The continued rise of information and communications technologies including the proliferation of misinformation and the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence and its adoption by governments and most other actors in the migration field indicate that this book is at the beginning of what should become a long-term and core area of migration studies. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.