Asylum systems are being rebuilt in code. Biometric registration, algorithmic triage, digital identity wallets, remote lodging portals, automated credibility assessment and inter-operable databases now mediate access to refugee protection. They also determine who reaches a border, whose claim is heard, and on what evidentiary terms. Such infrastructures are being procured from private vendors, including big tech companies; placing consequential decisions beyond parliamentary oversight, judicial review or administrative appeal. This represents the very accountability deficit, which arises when public functions are delegated to private actors.
This panel invites papers treating the rise of asylum digitalization as a political and policy phenomenon, rather than a technical one. It welcomes work that question issues such as:
- how digital systems reconfigure discreation within asylum bureaucracies;
- how private vendors are shaping the asylum policy process;
- how digitalization travels between jurisdictions (including between countries in the Global North and South) through policy transfer, conditionality and donor funding; and
- how asylum applicants, lawyers and civil servants contest, evade, or navigate these systems.
The panel particularly encourages contributions that decentre European and North American cases, and which examine major refugee hosting states in the Global South, where digital identification regimes are being piloted without public oversight.
This panel is methodologically open. Ethnographies, comparative policy analysis, process tracing, or other analytical or methodological methods are all appropriate. We also seek papers that connect the granular operations of such systems to broader questions about: democratic governance under uncertainty and rapid digital transformation; whether digitalization narrows or widens the space for asylum claim-making; and what institutional designs might render these infrastructures answerable to the people they govern. Work focusing on how gendered and racialized assumptions become encoded in classification systems and investigates who produces the categories through which protection is governed in the age of AI, is especially interesting.
Submissions from early career researchers and from (or in collboration with) scholars based in refugee-hosting states are strongly encouraged.
