The internet was supposed to make geography matter less. A software developer in Istanbul can work with colleagues in Berlin, serve clients in London, and contribute to an international tech community without crossing a single border. For someone forced to leave their home country, that can change everything. Digital tools offer a way to rebuild a career, start a business, and get back a professional identity that displacement tore apart.

There’s a catch, though. An entrepreneur can be known as a talented developer in an international community and still be invisible to the systems that govern whether they can take part. Their work crosses borders easily. Their identity, legal status, and access to basic digital services don’t.

Platforms create new ways in. They also draw new lines around who can participate, under what conditions, and how securely. The borders are still there. Most of them have moved somewhere we rarely look.

When skill and recognition stop lining up

Digital entrepreneurship gets sold as unusually open. You need little physical infrastructure. Products can be built remotely, teams can sit in different countries, and professional relationships can start in an online forum.

For displaced professionals, this flexibility matters a lot. A software engineer who flees may lose familiar institutions, networks, and recognized credentials, but years of technical knowledge come along. Portfolios, working products, and contributions to international projects give that knowledge somewhere to show up. In principle, competence starts to count for more than location.

In practice, contributing to the digital economy and participating in it on stable, recognized terms are two different things. Platforms and the infrastructure behind them run on rules about identity, location, eligibility, account access, contracts, financial services, and compliance. Those rules usually assume a fairly stable institutional identity and a legal situation that’s easy to read. Displaced people often don’t fit, however much expertise they have. The result is a contradiction. Someone can be professionally visible in a global digital community and institutionally precarious inside the systems that make that visibility possible.

That tension sits at the center of a study Uğur Yetkin and I recently published in Information Systems Journal. We looked at the lived experiences of eight highly skilled Syrian digital entrepreneurs in Istanbul, and at how their displacement collided with their dependence on global digital platforms. We call this condition platformed displacement.

Platforms govern who gets to participate

The usual story about platforms focuses on what they make possible, such as access to global markets, distributed collaboration, and new ventures. All of that is real. The story falls short when it treats platforms as neutral pipes that economic activity flows through.

A platform is also a governance arrangement. It decides who can open an account, which IDs count, how restrictions get applied, how reputation is built, and what happens when an automated enforcement system flags you. The infrastructure underneath adds more conditions through identity verification, technical standards, payment systems, risk scoring, and jurisdictional rules.

Plenty of these controls exist for good reasons. Digital markets need security, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance. My concern is how standardized rules interact with unusual or precarious circumstances, and how hard that interaction can land on some people compared with others.

Picture a displaced founder with strong ties in an international software community who still can’t satisfy documentation requirements somewhere else. Or a venture running on a globally distributed set of tools that an account restriction or a change in eligibility could knock offline. Or a developer whose visible technical work earns them credibility while the same digital environment files them under categories they have no easy way to challenge.

These cases go well beyond personal inconvenience. They expose the institutional conditions that make participation possible, conditional, or reversible. The distinction that matters here is between reaching a digital opportunity and holding a secure place in the infrastructure underneath it. Platforms can widen the first without doing much for the second.

Resilience is something people do

Resilience is usually framed as a personal trait, the grit to recover from setbacks and adapt when things go wrong. That framing gets something right, but it can pull attention away from what people actually do to keep their work alive.

We came at it differently in the study. Instead of treating resilience as a personality trait or a recovery outcome, we looked at how people enact it through everyday practice. Determination was part of the picture. Mostly, though, the entrepreneurs we interviewed were constantly rearranging technologies, institutional relationships, and professional identities to keep their ventures running. Three practices stood out, and they overlapped a lot.

1. Platformed improvisation

For some founders, the business ran on a shifting mix of cloud services, collaboration tools, development environments, professional networks, and online platforms, far more than on any office or fixed organizational setup. That mix gave them flexibility and mobility. It also tied them to services whose terms of access could change. They built alternative workflows, kept backups, switched tools, and kept reconfiguring how the venture operated. From the outside this looks like technical resourcefulness, and it is. It’s also a response to uncertainty about whether access would last. Their digital workplace had to be assembled again and again, then kept running.

2. Institutional workarounds

The second practice was about bridging gaps between national institutions and global digital infrastructure. Founders ran into conflicting requirements for documents, company registration, contracts, banking, and platform eligibility. Some looked at incorporating abroad. Others leaned on trusted intermediaries or put together arrangements that let the business function across systems that didn’t fit together.

These solutions were often messy. They could create fresh vulnerabilities, like dependence on third parties, unclear formal ownership, and ongoing exposure to rule changes. What matters for the analysis is that building a business took more than a good product and a market. Founders also had to do constant institutional work to make their companies recognizable and operational across different systems.

3. Transformative identity work

This one was the most personal. Forced displacement can break more than a job or a home address. It can break the link between what you know you are professionally and what others are willing to recognize. A highly experienced software engineer may find that years of achievement count for little in a new institutional setting.

Digital communities can partly mend that break. Code repositories, portfolios, and international technical networks let people be recognized for what they can demonstrably do. One entrepreneur described the relief of finding a community that recognized his skills rather than his paperwork.

Identity still had to be managed, though. Participants talked about choosing which parts of their background to show, foregrounding professional achievements, and sometimes reclaiming their displacement as a meaningful part of who they were as entrepreneurs. Calling that personal branding would miss what was going on. These were ways of holding on to professional legitimacy, dignity, and belonging while everything institutional stayed uncertain.

Put together, the three practices show resilience as an ongoing accomplishment. People produce it through technologies, relationships, organizational arrangements, and the effort of keeping a coherent professional identity intact.

The hidden work behind digital participation

It’s easy to celebrate how flexible digital entrepreneurship is. A globally distributed business looks more mobile and adaptable, and less tied to local constraints, than a traditional one. That flexibility can hide a lot of work.

The founders in our study often had to anticipate interruptions, maintain fallback arrangements, manage institutional uncertainty, and adjust how they presented themselves to different audiences and systems. Very little of that shows up in conventional accounts of entrepreneurial performance. A customer sees a delivered product. A platform logs a completed task. A professional community sees a portfolio or a technical contribution. What stays mostly invisible is the work it took to produce those outcomes on top of unstable access.

That suggests a different question about entrepreneurial resilience. Asking why some entrepreneurs succeed despite adversity is fine, but we should also look at the extra organizational labor it takes to get in the door at all, and ask who pays for it.

The paradox of digital belonging

The part of our findings I keep thinking about concerns belonging. Discussions of refugee integration usually focus on relationships with host-country institutions, communities, and labor markets. Digital entrepreneurship adds another dimension. A displaced professional can build strong ties with international colleagues and technical communities while staying much less connected to the institutions of the country they live in.

Digital spaces can offer a meaningful kind of professional belonging that reaches beyond national borders. That belonging comes with conditions. Recognition in a technical community doesn’t automatically make someone institutionally eligible for anything. A reputation built across borders can sit right alongside a precarious position in national and transnational governance systems.

The asymmetry is striking. Global digital communities may recognize what a person can contribute, while the infrastructure governing participation still sorts that person by where they come from, where they live, or which documents they hold. Those two kinds of recognition can point in different directions. For displaced entrepreneurs, the digital economy can be a place of renewed professional agency and also one more place where displacement is felt.

Why inclusion needs more than skills training

Public and private programs for refugee entrepreneurs tend to focus on education, digital skills, mentoring, and entrepreneurial capacity. Those can be genuinely useful, especially for people who need to build new competencies. They fall short when expertise was never the obstacle.

The entrepreneurs in our study already had substantial technical ability and experience with globally oriented digital work. Their difficulties were mostly about whether they could use those abilities through the institutional and technological arrangements available to them. A training program can’t fix mismatched identity requirements on its own. Better coding skills won’t guarantee stable access to digital services. And no amount of ambition makes up for every institutional barrier.

So the familiar question, how can we make displaced people more employable or entrepreneurial?, needs a companion. How can we make the institutions and infrastructure of the digital economy better at including people whose circumstances fall outside their default assumptions? One approach changes the individual to fit the system. The other also asks whether the system should change.

Making digital inclusion an infrastructure responsibility

Our findings point to several priorities for platform operators, policymakers, and organizations that support entrepreneurship.

Platforms should look closely at how eligibility rules, automated enforcement, and identity verification affect people with nonstandard documents or precarious legal status. When a decision seriously affects someone’s ability to earn a living, they should get a meaningful explanation and a way to have it reviewed. Platform governance and regulatory compliance also belong in the same conversation as accessibility and inclusion. Legitimate safeguards should stay. The goal is procedures that can handle documented variations in identity and status without weakening security.

Host-country entrepreneurship policy should be coordinated with business registration, financial access, and legal recognition, because digital ventures operate across borders while their founders still live inside national institutions. Universities, incubators, NGOs, and entrepreneurship programs can help by pairing skills development with support for navigating institutions and getting access to legitimate digital infrastructure.

Accountability needs far more attention when participation depends on several organizations working across different jurisdictions. When an automated restriction cuts off someone’s work, who can explain the decision? Where can they ask for a review? How do they get their circumstances understood? These are questions about governance, power, and economic participation, and they sit at the center of the problem.

We should be careful about celebrating resilience

The entrepreneurs we studied showed a lot of creativity and determination. The way they reorganized their digital work, got around institutional barriers, and rebuilt professional identities is impressive. Resilience can also become a comforting story, though, one that lets us skip over the conditions that made all that effort necessary.

When people have to keep improvising to hold on to ordinary economic participation, their ability to improvise is two things at once. It’s an achievement, and it’s a sign of institutional fragility. There’s also a limit to how much adapting anyone can sustain. Workarounds fail, trusted relationships wear thin, access rules change, and the emotional cost of constantly maintaining professional legitimacy adds up.

I should be clear about what our research is. It’s an in-depth qualitative study of eight male Syrian founders, based on interviews conducted in 2021–2022 and documentary analysis for context. It doesn’t measure how widespread these dynamics are, it doesn’t establish why platforms made particular decisions, and it doesn’t claim that all refugees experience digital entrepreneurship the same way. What it does show is how these founders experienced and navigated the overlap of displacement, institutional constraints, and platform dependence.

Their experiences still raise a broader question about how open the digital economy really is. If taking part depends on whether complex institutional systems can recognize and accommodate who people are, as well as on what they can do, how inclusive is it?

Inclusion that runs on heroics

Digital technology has created real opportunities for displaced professionals to rebuild their livelihoods, reconnect with international communities, and start ventures. Those opportunities deserve to be taken seriously, and so do the difficulties of reaching them. Celebrating the individual who beats the odds is the easy part. Looking hard at the barriers themselves is the work.

An inclusive digital economy would make professional participation more secure, its rules easier to understand, and its governance more responsive to people whose lives don’t follow standard institutional paths.

That’s the measure I’d use. Connecting to a platform is the starting point. Inclusion means people can participate, be recognized, and build a lasting professional future without having to keep proving they belong.

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* This commentary draws on research conducted with Uğur Yetkin. Tunçalp, D., & Yetkin, U. (2026). “Resilience Practices Under Platformed Displacement: A Phenomenology of Refugee Digital Entrepreneurs.” Information Systems Journal, Special Issue on Refugees and Migration Issues. Read the full article at https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.70066