VOLARES – Volatile Borders: Law, Asylum, and Refugee Struggles in the Digital Age

In this panel, I present a proposal for a research project, entitled "VOLARES – Volatile Borders: Law, Asylum, and Refugee Struggles in the Digital Age", I am planning for my postdoctoral research. The project VOLARES examines the socio-legal implications of the European Union’s (EU) increasing reliance on digital technologies for migration management, focusing on how these technologies construct “volatile borders” and impact refugee lives. As EUrope’s (EU and Schengen states) borders become increasingly invisible rather than purely territorial, the project explores how these digital infrastructures of control reconfigure legal, physical, and social boundaries. The word “volatile” derives from the Latin “volārē”, denoting "to fly, to go quickly". The project identifies volatility as a function of EUrope’s digital infrastructures: their constant technical updates, legal reconfigurations, and algorithmic opacity, creating an unpredictable and often inaccessible environment for protection seekers. The word “volatile” also captures the human agency element of digital tools: it evokes themes of freedom and bodily movement, portraying the volatility of both digital borders and refugee-centered mobility, knowledge, and struggles for freedom. This research aims to provide a nuanced understanding of this evolving terrain by blending analyses of legal frameworks and the embodied, lived experiences of refugees (including asylum seekers). The research questions are: How do digital borders reshape asylum governance and refugee rights in EUrope, and how do refugees engage with and resist these systems? The project has three main objectives to address these questions. First, it provides an in-depth socio-legal analysis of how legal instruments construct digital borders within the EU’s reformed Common European Asylum System, including the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. This involves an examination of the interoperability of large-scale IT systems, such as Eurodac, the Visa Information System, and the new Entry/Exit System, and the legal rationales justifying their expansion. Second, through fieldwork in key locations, the research investigates how refugees experience and navigate these digital terrains, examining how socio-technical factors—such as biometric registration and digital identity verification—enable or obstruct their access to rights. The third objective is to critically assess the ethical and legal implications of this trend, particularly concerning fundamental principles of human dignity, non-discrimination, and the right to asylum in the context of automated decision-making and data-driven profiling. The project will employ a unique interdisciplinary methodology that combines legal analysis with ethnographic and visual research methods. The primary research material will include a qualitative analysis of the EU acquis, reports from international organizations, and ethnographic data from semi-structured interviews with asylum authorities, refugees, and NGO representatives. A key, innovative component of the project is the multimodal analysis of refugee-produced digital images and communications, as well as a public exhibition of the reconstructed versions of these outputs to communicate research findings to a broader audience. This artistic approach aims to capture the aesthetic and non-verbal aspects of the refugee experience that are often lost in legal texts and purely textual academic reports, thereby creating a more accessible and impactful form of scholarly communication that can reach a wider public.