Digital Mobilities and Smart Borders: How Digital Technologies Transform Migration and Sovereign Borders

The integration of digital technologies into daily life is making social and political relations reliant on digitally stored and transmitted data. Digital Mobilities studies the impacts of ‘digitisation’ on state borders and global migration. It demonstrates how digitisation at the border, including the digital enhancement of migration and growth of smart borders, is changing the dynamics of international travel and altering the very nature of state territory.

Digitisation is one of the most powerful and pervasive motivators of social change in the 21st century. It involves digital technologies being incorporated into the activities and interactions of daily life. Digitisation is promoted by governments seeking to increase the controllability of populations, businesses hoping to enhance the efficiency of production and exchange, and individuals looking to extend their social networks and digitally augment their daily activities. Digital Mobilities contributes to the growing body of work examining digitisation and social change by studying the impacts of digitisation on state territories, borders and global travel. From e-gates, drone patrols and biometric databases to smartphone-equipped asylum seeking and pre-checked-in business travel, there is no aspect of contemporary bordering and movement that is not being digitised. The resulting socio-technical features of borders and migration are impacting the way people move around the world, as well as the means states use to control, monitor and facilitate that movement.