A critical study of the Centre for Management of Incidents & Emergencies, Athens

The Centre for Management of Incidents & Emergencies (CMIE) was established in Athens in 2021 to collect and process surveillance footage from new 'closed' refugee camps across Greece. The CMIE’s central purpose is to monitor and predict possible ‘unknown threats’ that might be taking place in these spaces. Greece’s location as a first transit country, and its economic and cultural periphery to the EU, renders it as fertile ground from which to test migration management policies and technologies by the bloc’s migratory agencies. This presentation takes the CMIE as a case study to consider the increasing role of technology and predictive systems evident in the European Union’s migration management tactics, as well as the role Greece plays as a testing ground for emergent surveillance technologies.