This was presented by Anamaria Topan from the University of Innsbruck at the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC2016) in Barcelona on 27th April. You can find out more information about the conference here: https://www.mysociety.org/research/tictec-2016/

1. SMARTPHONES FOR SAFETY: DIGITAL
TECHNOLOGIES AND THE REFUGEES’
JOURNEY
Anamaria Topan
University of Innsbruck, Austria

2. Introduction
- the importance of the research focusing on the
journey of the refugees
- giving space to the voices, needs and aspirations
of refugees
- Focus on the Balkan route in the context of the
current ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe
- The critical importance of communication
technologies for refugees to manage the journey,
keep contact with loved ones, staying abreast of
developments

3. Percentage of Syrian
refugees in the main receiving
countries
0
5
10
15
20
25
EU
Turkey
Lebanon
Jordan
percentage of total
population

4. First contact: Smugglers
• Smartphones and access to internet were crucial in
getting the necessary information to plan the journey
• smuggling with consent of authorities: complex
transnational networks
• Risks: trafficking - robbing, death threats, forcing into
sexual exploitation and drug dealing
• Plus: provide services, facilitating mobility of refugees
due to lack of legal routes
• Need for a change of paradigm: form a discourse of law
and order to one centering on persecution and flee
• Central role of refugee’s agency

5. The Balkan Route
(August 2015-March 2016)

6. Main developments along the Balkan
routes
• 1. Route - the shortest and the cheapest - Greece, Serbia, Hungary,
Austria, Germany
• mid-September 2015: Hungary closes its border
• 2. Route: Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Austria and Germany
• November 2015:
- free train services from Serbia to Croatia
- transit limited to war refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq
• February 2016:
• - direct transport corridor from Macedonia to Austria
- Austria introduces a daily limit of 3200 refugees, Croatia: 580
- Macedonia stops Afghans at the border
• March 2016:
- complete closing of the Balkan route (March 8)
- EU-Turkey deal comes into force (March 20)

7. Communication technology
• The crucial importance of communication for refugees:
smartphones as an indispensable tool to find assistance,
communicate with family and friends, organizing the travel at each
stage, keeping with the news, reuniting with family etc.
• Governments, international NGOs, UN bodies, companies came
together to provide technical infrastructure along the route, i.e.
NetHope, Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC), Google,
Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF)
- Wi-Fi connectivity
- charging stations
- public TV sets
Ex.: TSF data- 269.814 devices connected to the Wi-Fi; an average
of 150 WhatsApp messages sent/phone, GB used: 23.946

8. New Aesthetics
• The omnipresence of images in the media and
social media: witnessing what happens in real
time

9. New Aesthetics
• Production of Ambivalence
I. The ‘Willkommenskultur’, especially in
Germany, Austria, Greece

10. II. The flourish of the extreme right political
spectrum
• ‘visually frustrating’
• The New Year’s Eve attacks of women in Köln
• The recent terrorists attack in Paris and Brussels
• Instrumentalising the debate for political gain:
- offering simplistic explanations of a complex
phenomenon, providing anchors
- exploiting people’s fatigue with intellectual
arguments, their need for peace and safety

11. Main consequences of the refugee
crisis
I. The EU-Turkey Deal
- Turkey declared a safe country =>refugees
crossing the sea from Turkey into Greece are
now illegal
- ‘one for one scheme’ - EU Commission
agreed on 72.000 refugees
- 6 billion aid for Turkey
- Visa-free travel for Turkish citizens to EU

12. Problems:
• Turkey is not a safe country: at war with Kurds and IS
• Huge number of refugees, with pressure on the local
population: social tensions, affected tourism
• High corruption of the political elite and unreliability of
the President Erdoğan
• Massive infrastructure needed for implementation of
return and resettlement of refugees
• Unwillingness of EU countries to implement visa-free
travel for Turkey
• Reluctance of many EU members to resettle refugees

13. II. Security and Protection
• Double the staff and increasing the budget of
Frontex
• Creating of a European Border and Coast Guard
Agency
• Increasing security, border control, militarization
of the borders
• Increasing support for Jordan, Lebanon and
Turkey – pressure to liberalize their health and
work market for refugees
• Political pressure for the Syrian peace
negotiations to work

14. Conclusions
• Inability of EU to find a a different approach to the refugee
crisis: focus on burden, criminalizing => protection and
border closures, detention and forced deportation
• the importance of digital management in allowing the
refugees to remain ‘sane’ and negotiate their environment
of barriers and obstacles
• smartphones and internet access (social media) are vital
components in articulating refugee voices, in catalyzing
their agency and marking their diversity
• signal the need for a paradigm shift from viewing refugees
as passive, dependent and homogenous to seeing them as
a resource of agency, in(ter)dependence and innovation