Navigating the Aegean Sea: smartphones, transnational activism and viapolitical in(ter)ventions in contested maritime borderzones

ABSTRACT

Scholars concerned with the use of ICTs at the EU’s external borders have mainly focused on practices of control that draw on sophisticated surveillance technologies. In this paper I address migrants’ use of ICT itself, arguing that it has fundamentally transformed how undocumented border crossings are actually accomplished. In late 2015, when every day thousands of migrants crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, GPS-enabled smartphones played a pivotal role during their journeys, allowing migrants to navigate the sea and to get in touch with transnational support networks. Based on my own work for one of these networks, the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone, I demonstrate how migrants made emergency calls or alerted supporters via WhatsApp, who in turn mapped and tracked their positions and movements at sea and intervened in situations of distress in real-time. The paper contributes to debates on ‘data politics’ (Bigo, Isin, and Ruppert [2019]. Data Politics. Worlds, Subjects, Rights. London: Routledge) by drawing on the concepts of viapolitics and tempo-politics. While the former captures how journeys, vehicles and routes of migration become means and sites of contestation, the latter addresses situations in which the time-spaces of migration become matters of concern in border struggles.

KEYWORDS:

• Aegean sea
• border crossing
• smartphones
• tempo-politics
• viapolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Author’s statistic based on Alarm Phone case reports published on http://watchthemed.net. For similar numbers with a slightly different timeframe see Stierl 2019; 109.

2 See Frontex 2015, 21, for an insightful illustration of the shift towards maritime border crossings after the Evros border fence was erected at the Turkish-Greek land border in 2012.

3 Admittedly, many of these representations reproduced the naturalisation of migration as a mere physical movement, which Nicholas De Genova has called border spectacle (De Genova 2013; see van Reekum 2016). Yet, some representations went far beyond visualisations of invasion or suffering, opening up imaginations of hope (see, e.g., Fish in Water Films 2016; The Guardian 2015).

4 See, for instance, the reintroduction of internal border checks between Hungary and Austria after a lorry with more than 70 bodies on board was found on an Austrian motorway. It caused long traffic jams and delays on the Hungarian side of the border and induced a shift in the means of transport used by undocumented migrants, namely from cars to trains.

5 Aside from the Aegean Sea, during the long summer of migration, political struggles for freedom of movement operated ‘in and around vehicles, routes and infrastructures’ (Walters 2015, 477), too. To give but a few examples, think of the coaches which were provided for the participants of the #marchofhope on the Hungarian motorway, eventually carrying them to the Hungarian-Austrian border; the spontaneous purchase and donation of online train-tickets for the #trainsofhope, the ‘railway replacement service’ of the Refugee Convoy; or the trucks and vans of Moving Europe and others, who travelled on the Balkan corridor and became mobile infrastructures of flight help.