Dotted journeys:digital technologies and Afghan migration in European borderlands

This thesis examines the articulation between digital technologies and migration journeys in European borderlands in the early 2020s. During this period marked by border violence, my ethnography focuses on the role of smartphone infrastructures, social media platforms, and biometric technologies in migrants’ and refugees’ land journeys in Southeastern Europe. My fieldwork took place mainly among Afghans on the move and grassroots organisations between 2021 and 2023 in Romandie (Switzerland), Trieste (Italy), Una-Sana Canton (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Vojvodina (Serbia). I analyse people on the move’s everyday digital practices and the power dynamics stemming from these practices in relation to the states' attempts at controlling and surveilling mobile people. I argue that digital technologies both enhance and constrain people on the move’s agency. To do so, the thesis weaves a narrative thread around the notion of ‘dotted journeys’, where dots symbolise the GPS points that are crucial on these journeys and the data generated by digital practices. The interaction between mobilities and technologies generates sociotechnical imaginaries and body techniques to navigate unpredictability and precarity. In changing material, multilingual and multimodal contexts, border violence works directly and indirectly, by delegating violence to (broken) digital tools and landscapes. This thesis is based on collaborative methods and perspectives from below to contribute to digital anthropology and critical migration studies by locating smartphone use within relations of power.