Cite as : Noori, S., 2020, Navigating the Aegean Sea: smartphones, transnational activism and viapolitical in (ter) ventions in contested maritime borderzones. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, pp.1-17.
Scholars concerned with the use of ICTs at the EU’s external borders have mainly focused on practices of control that draw on sophisticated surveillance technologies. In this paper I address migrants’ use of ICT itself, arguing that it has fundamentally transformed how undocumented border crossings are actually accomplished. In late 2015, when every day thousands of migrants crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, GPS-enabled smartphones played a pivotal role during their journeys, allowing migrants to navigate the sea and to get in touch with transnational support networks.