(Un)making the Frontex PeDRA controversy: Freedom of information and the regime of opacity in EU migration management

Abstract

This 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