Undoing data. The ‘migration crisis’ statistics by the International organization for migration and its discontents in Niger

Research inspired by Science and Technology Studies has examined how statistics produce mobilities as objects of government and the resulting discriminatory effects. This article adds to this framework by proposing ‘undoing data’ as a concept for the situated critiques of accountability, power and responsibility that actors engage in to shape the politics of calculating mobilities. In such critical engagement with and disengagement from data, practitioners and academics scrutinize the statistical measurement and categorization against scientific standards, hold the actors behind such data responsible and avoid the data. As a reflexive and prefigurative practice of critique, undoing data suggests potential alternatives of thinking and datafying mobility otherwise. The article develops this argument by examining the controversies surrounding the flow monitoring that the International Organization for Migration employs in its Displacement Tracking Matrix in Niger. In this major transit country between West and North Africa, the IOM data represents an alleged ‘migration crisis’ and mobilizes for governance interventions. During our ethnographic fieldwork in 2018–2020, practitioners and academics in Niger criticized the flow monitoring for the estimations, the category of ‘outflow’ and the stereotyping it relied on, and they widely refrained from using the data.