The governmentalisation of personal digital archives in asylum procedures

Author(s) : Ivan Josipovic

Source : https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2492350

Abstract:

Asylum bureaucracies in Europe are undergoing processes of digitalisation, including the use of new digital data sources to inform decision-making in refugee status determination. The extraction of asylum seekers’ smartphone data, based on new policies across Europe, testifies to an intensified struggle for epistemic authority and reignites questions about the politics of knowledge production. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it demonstrates that the governmentalisation of digital archives predates formal policies for smartphone examinations. Drawing on empirical data from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, including court files, policy documents and expert interviews, the paper identifies the epistemic strategies deployed by asylum decision-makers in relation to smartphone data and discusses (dis)continuities in relation to the new policy-based procedures. Second, the article contributes to the literature on the politics of knowledge production in asylum governance by placing the findings into the context of Foucauldian governmentality studies. I argue that while the governmentalisation of personal digital archives reinforces well-established insecuritisation processes in asylum, it critically relies on a novel form of power, namely what Isin and Ruppert call ‘sensory power’.

Kexwords: asylum, digital archives, epistemic strategies, governmentality, policy