1,720,982 research outputs found
(Un)making the Frontex PeDRA controversy: Freedom of information and the regime of opacity in EU migration management
No full textThis paper examines the controversy surrounding ‘PeDRA’—a Frontex surveillance programme for harvesting data from illegalized migrants—to explore how opaque security practices are transformed into objects of public-political contestation. By centring the EU’s freedom of information (FOI) mechanism as both a methodological and analytical vantage point for interrogating the regime of opacity in EU migration management, it contributes to debates in critical border and security studies concerned with mundane entanglements between secrecy and security. How do FOI mechanisms intervene in the politics of controversy and broader epistemic struggles surrounding Europe’s border regime, and what forms of (non-)knowledge do they engender? Drawing on a large trove of confidential records, the analysis shows, first, how FOI disclosures can be mobilised to trace the emergence of controversies by exposing the internal contestations and irregularities that underpinned the unlawful expansion of PeDRA. Second, it identifies the obfuscatory tactics that EU border bureaucracies deployed to strategically manage the political reverberations of the controversy, both in the public arena and the bureaucratic backstage. While FOI mechanisms cannot undo the irreducible opacity of datafied bordering infrastructures, the paper concludes that they remain vital tools for rendering security practices (partially) visible and, thus, politically contestable
Unruly subjects: Migration, solidarity and resistance in Greece
No full textUnruly Subjects takes readers to the epicentre of Europe's intensifying border struggles-the Aegean islands in Greece, where thousands of 'undesirable' migrants have been warehoused and violently abandoned in EU-funded refugee camps. Drawing on nearly a decade of research, Ludek Stavinoha reveals the subterranean corners in which resistance brews and solidarity takes hold, tracing migrants' everyday struggles for dignity and their rights, alongside grassroots volunteers who have built vital infrastructures of support. At the heart of the book are the creative, if precarious and ambivalent, solidarities forged between volunteers and refugees, citizens and non-citizens, as they unsettle racialised boundaries and logics of control, in defiance of state-sanctioned violence, criminalisation, and neglect. Urgent and compelling, Unruly Subjects illuminates how people navigate and subvert Europe's increasingly hostile border regime, and the alternative imaginaries of more just futures their struggles embody
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