Data, Power, and the Postcolony: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aslı Çalkıvik on the Policing of Refugees through Digital Thingification

On April 15, 2025, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aslı Çalkıvik was invited by the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College-Hartford to present a lecture titled Digital Thingification in the PostColony: How Data is Transforming the Policing of Refugees. In her talk, Çalkıvik offered a critical examination of the role data plays in contemporary refugee governance, with a particular focus on how digital infrastructures reanimate colonial dynamics within the Global South.

 

While International Relations scholarship has increasingly addressed the political impact of digital technologies, critical engagement with the politics of data often remains limited to the contexts of the Global North, such as biometric border systems in Europe and the United States or algorithmic warfare targeting racialized populations. In contrast, Çalkıvik shifted the focus to the Global South, probing how everyday data practices in refugee management contribute to the reproduction of the coloniality of power.

 

Central to her analysis was the concept of thingification, a process by which individuals are stripped of political subjectivity and rendered into data points to be classified, monitored, and managed. Drawing from decolonial theory, Çalkıvik argued that datafication does more than record social life; it actively transforms displaced persons into administrative objects within logistical systems of control. These processes, while often framed as humanitarian or technocratic, in fact mirror and perpetuate historical structures of imperial domination.

 

Çalkıvik’s lecture called for a critical reassessment of digital governance and refugee policy, emphasizing the need to understand data not as a neutral tool but as a socio-technical artifact shaped by political interests. By highlighting the structural injustices embedded in digital infrastructures, she urged scholars and policymakers to consider alternative frameworks of data justice—ones grounded in collective rights, dignity, and democratic accountability.

 

Digital Thingification in the PostColony not only contributes to debates in International Relations and postcolonial studies but also opens new pathways for confronting the ethical and political challenges of the digital age.