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Between 2014 and 2022, asylum seekers on mainland Greece had to initiate claims by calling the government on Skype, yet their calls were rarely answered. Written in Athens alongside asylum applicants as they called and called without reply, this book uncovers an eight-year human rights abuse that has never been documented. Stephen Damianos exposes how a mundane telecommunications platform became a powerful instrument of exclusion and erasure, immersing readers in Kafkaesque abandonment. Advancing the concept of “digital pushback,” he demonstrates how governments increasingly use unspectacular tools to generate spectacularly violent realities with little to no accountability. Asylum Is Unavailable provides a vivid portrait of human suffering and an urgent warning about embracing technology at the expense of humanity.
“Asylum Is Unavailable is meticulous, devastating, and impossible to put down. Stephen Damianos has rescued from oblivion a chapter of European history that powerful actors preferred to leave undocumented. His painstaking investigation shows how digital systems are quietly becoming the most effective border walls ever built: invisible, deniable, and brutally efficient. Of 8,835 calls from asylum seekers to the Greek Asylum Service, just 9 were answered—a statistic that should haunt every European capital and the tech companies that enable them.”—Gregory Maniatis, Director, Refugees & Migration, Open Society Foundations
“Advancing the concept of ‘digital pushback,’ Damianos exposes how states engineer new forms of exclusion without scrutiny or accountability, concealing systematic harm in mundane machinery. Asylum Is Unavailable sheds light on the abuses governments can hide in the shadows of digital infrastructure, and the human cost of looking away. Sobering and impossible to ignore, this is essential reading for scholars and policymakers grappling with the future of asylum protection in a digital world.”—Alexander Betts, Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, University of Oxford
“Asylum Is Unavailable is a poignant and immense account of how governments utilize digital technologies to engineer harm without scrutiny or consequence, evading true accountability with exclusion designed into bureaucracy. Damianos vividly brings to life how a technology’s ordinary image can hide the extraordinary harm it produces when deployed in support of punitive political agendas. Written with equal parts conviction, narrative, and analysis, this book never loses sight of the people at its center, making the abhorrent treatment of each individual palpable on every page. At a moment when similar digitization efforts are spreading globally, we cannot afford to look away.”—Damini Satija, Director of Amnesty Tech, Amnesty International
“Border practices are often ingrained with tedium and monotony to degrade human time, making their violence harder to see and difficult to challenge. In this outstanding debut, Damianos cuts through that obscurity with empirical rigor and humanity to expose a system designed to exhaust and exclude. This book bears witness to those the system sought to erase, offering an antidote to state-sanctioned silencing.”—Victoria Canning, Professor of Criminology, Lancaster University, and author of Torture and Torturous Violence
“A meticulous and damning account of how bureaucratic design can be weaponized against the most vulnerable, Asylum Is Unavailable forces us to reckon with a form of cruelty hidden in plain sight that has harmed thousands of real people asking for protection.”—Petra Molnar, Faculty Associate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, and author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
“Digital technologies may promise streamlined, efficient interfaces of governance, but often they deliver the opposite, whether by chance or by design. Long associated with sluggish and overburdened bureaucracies, the Greek government relied for over a decade on the now defunct Skype system to register asylum claimants—even at the height of the ‘refugee crisis,’ when over a million people entered Greece. Damianos’s beautifully written and carefully crafted book unveils the violence the Greek state wielded through this technology, and the strategies claimants used to resist. This meticulously researched and deeply compelling work shows the dangers and human costs of digital borders that otherwise remain hidden.”—Heath Cabot, University of Bergen, and author of On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece
“At a time when fantastical technologies seem to inescapably command our attention and curiosity, this book is a salient reminder of how border violence continues to operate in the silences, the non-responses, and the mundane methods by which asylum seekers are kept at the gates, even when they are physically within them. Damianos has provided a powerful and compelling account of how communication technologies heralded for extending connection for some become eternal waiting rooms for others, keeping them in a suspended state of precarity, where asylum—and indeed life—is unavailable.”—Matt Mahmoudi, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge, and Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Amnesty International