With Michele Ferris-Dobles, professor and media researcher at the University of Costa Rica.

Online | 3:30-5:00 PM (CET) | Registration form will be available in due course.

“You cannot apply for asylum or refugee status without access to a computer or a phone with an internet connection.” This statement, shared by a migrant woman seeking refuge, captures the paradox of digital dependency that increasingly defines asylum procedures in Costa Rica. For migrant women, access to international protection is mediated through digital platforms that are simultaneously indispensable and exclusionary. While digital technologies are required to claim the right to asylum, they are often inaccessible, unreliable, slow, bureaucratic, and dysfunctional.

This article examines the asylum-seeking process in Costa Rica through a qualitative, decolonial, and feminist approach, drawing on in-depth interviews, focus groups, digital diaries, and the analysis of state digital interfaces. It focuses on how migrant women are pushed to learn, navigate, and depend on digital technologies in their pursuit of refuge. The findings reveal that government digital platforms systematically (dis)empower women by forcing them to engage with complex, inefficient, and opaque bureaucratic systems. These digital processes disproportionately affect women facing intersecting inequalities related to migration status, class, ethnicity, caregiving responsibilities, and exposure to violence.

Based on ethnographic research, the article highlights how migrant women develop collective strategies of care, knowledge-sharing, and resistance to navigate the multiple layers of violence embedded in these digital infrastructures. I argue that dysfunctional, overcomplicated, and bureaucratic digital asylum systems constitute a form of digital violence. Dysfunction is not a technical flaw but a structural mechanism that deepens migrant precarity by restricting access to protection and fundamental rights. Through digitization, state power extends the border regime into the digital realm and the everyday lives of migrant women. State digital platforms and infrastructures for asylum-seeking mask gendered forms of exclusion under narratives of technological progress and efficiency.