The Marketization of Displacement

The project examines a growing aspect of state and non-state actors’ migration management, namely upscaled and accelerated collection of data. This includes many different forms of data, including about biometrics, skillsets, communication, mobility and consumption. Data is considered "the new gold" and new markets crosscutting states, consultancies, humanitarian and development actors are emerging and being created. Transnational databases are increasingly underpinning policy-making at both national, EU and global levels, and the technical risks associated with their function creeps and interoperabilities constitute pressing questions.

This development is often framed positively in terms of migrant empowerment and increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness, asked for by donors, in migration management interventions. At the critical level, issues related to privacy, consent, and the formation of new social hierarchies for already vulnerable displacees are points of concern. Lemberg-Pedersen´s project analyses these issues through a postcolonial and political economic lens, by comparing current politics and practices with the harvesting of and reliance on data in earlier displacement, migration and labour regimes, including the European trans-Atlantic slavery from West Africa to the Americas, and the associated commodities chains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The aim is to offer substantial reflections on the trajectories, potentialities and risks associated with the use of data in current migration management.