Doing Refugee Right(s) with Technologies? Humanitarian Crises and the Multiplication of “Exceptional” Legal States

Abstract

Abstract Like borders, refugee protection settings beyond the EU often serve as testing grounds for technologies. This article takes a socio-legal perspective to show how humanitarian experimentation in these contexts is made possible through different, interacting challenges to sovereignty. It argues that the understanding that actors or their positions are “exceptional” allows for and justifies data practices that would otherwise not be legally permissible. Examples of data practices in refugee protection settings are connected to work in geopolitics, science and technology studies, and sociology of law. The article shows how the position of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as negotiator on behalf of refugees and an emergency-driven techno-solutionism not only interacts with the already precarious legal context most people seeking refuge find themselves in. It coincides with the legal positioning of International Organisations and with citizenship-oriented conceptions of privacy, further constituting people seeking refuge as (digital) rights optional. This is problematic not least because of concerns about adequate data protection or the implications of bias. Data flows and algorithms are generative of the politics of contemporary societies, implying that the structural undermining of digital rights of people seeking refuge in the present can also hinder their access to rights in the future.