This study aims to draw attention to the stories of Afghan unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Sweden; their reasons to leave Afghanistan and to migrate to Sweden, the way that they migrate, and the problems they face during their journey to Sweden are investigated. In order to achieve the aims of this study, a qualitative method is used based on semi-structured interviews. Altogether, eight people are interviewed of which six are Afghan male unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, one is a legal guardian and one is an assistant (behandlingsassistent). Theories such as push and pull factors, migration industry theory, transit migration theory, and social network theory help to understand better the stories of Afghan unaccompanied children while analyzing the data.The data obtained from interviews shows that the children who were leaving Afghanistan had mixed motivations. Factors such as lack of security, violence, threats, individual risks associated with their ethnicity, forced recruitment, economic hardship and political reasons push them to leave Afghanistan. My findings show that the main reason for the children to leave Afghanistan is the harassment and violence against the ethnic group Hazara.Moreover, the data demonstrates that traveling with smugglers and crossing borders, by land or by sea, is a multiple-step procedure for Afghan unaccompanied children. They have many stops along the way and spend lots of time in different transit countries. The journey is full of risks for them. My interviews reveal that transit migration creates a number of problems for these children.In addition, this study indicates that the role of social networks is of great importance for these children. The smugglers create strong incentives for their decision to claim asylum in Sweden. Moreover, co-migrants and friends of friend who live in Europe play a significant role in their decision-making. Furthermore, restrictive legislations as well as lack of protection in transit countries make onward migration inevitable. Other factors, such as the probability of getting a residence permit and family reunification, are important for Afghan unaccompanied children to choose Sweden as a destination country.

In this thesis, I sought to accomplish two things. First, the thesis is written in a reflexive and even an auto-ethnographic manner. It invites the reader to follow the ethnographer through the metamorphosis of the study, from the point of conception, through the ethnographic fieldwork to the interpretation and, finally, to the presentation of the result. Doing so was an attempt to give the reader a vivid understanding of the process of making an ethnographic text. The ambition with auto-ethnographic dimension is to unveil and problematize the condition for ethnographic fieldwork, as well as to add nuance to the stories of my informants. Second, the thesis strives to answer a simple question: why the UK? The genesis of the question finds its roots in the departure of my friend Kanan, and it was by tracing Kanan’s journey that I found myself in Calais. By focusing on a transit zone like Calais, I have aimed to depart from a dualist approach of migration theories that only focus on destination and origin countries as their analytical points of reference and to present the everyday experiences of exile and statelessness as a continuous journey. The conduit for examining the experiences of my informants will be Chris Dolan’s concept of social torture. Through the concept of social torture, Chris Dolan interlinks the exercise of everyday violence and abuse on a mass scale and torture by focussing on the impacts of such acts on the individual’s body and mind. By doing so, Dolan identifies debility, dependency, dread and disorientation as the four impacts to identify a victim of social torture. The daily life experiences of my informants in Calais were that of social torture.  In this regard, I seek to show how social torture was an apparatus used to force unwanted populations from the French territory and into the UK and other European countries.

Cette thèse s’intéresse au rôle des TIC dans l’évolution du projet migratoire des migrants africains subsahariens en Turquie. L’approche interdisciplinaire choisie a permis d’aborder la question sous l’angle sociologique et communicationnelle en prenant en compte les aspects politiques et géographiques. La migration des africains subsahariens vers la Turquie est associée au renforcement des contrôles aux frontières externes notamment européennes qui favorise la construction de nouvelles routes migratoires et nouveaux pôles de transit. Ce renforcement des contrôles frontaliers conduisent les migrants à reformuler leur projet migratoire. Dans ce contexte de migrations irrégulières, cette thèse cherche à comprendre comment les migrants approprient les TIC et quel est rôle de celles-ci dans la construction et le maintien des réseaux sociaux. / This thesis intends to question the role of ICTs in the evolution of the migration project of the sub-Saharan African migrants in Turkey. The interdisciplinary approach adopted in this thesis allowed to examine the question under sociological and communicational point of view by taking into account the political and geographical aspects. The migration of African sub-Saharan towards Turkey is associated with the reinforcement of controls at the external border, particularly in Europe, which favors the appereance of new migratory roads and new transit hubs. This reinforcement of border controls leads the migrants to reformulate their migration project. In this context of irregular migrations, this thesis intends to understand how the ICTs are appropriated by migrants and what is the role of these technologies in the construction and the maintenance of the social networks.

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