This project offers a pioneering investigation of the everyday politics of transparency in the work of three pivotal European Union (EU) border bureaucracies: Frontex, the EU Asylum Agency, and the European Commission. It seeks to shed new light on how transparency is interpreted, negotiated, and practiced in day-to-day bureaucratic processes that underpin EU ‘migration management’ - one of today’s most politically contentious policy domains.

This project deploys ‘Freedom of Information’ (FOI) mechanisms as a unique methodological and analytical vantage point for interrogating the regime of opacity that surrounds the everyday workings of these institutions. First, through analysis of a vast corpus of hitherto confidential documents generated by these bureaucracies as they script and enact bordering policies, particular attention will be paid to traces of fundamental rights violations at the EU’s external borders within internal records, and how these traces are simultaneously inscribed in yet obscured through mundane bureaucratic practices. Second, through interviews with senior EU bureaucrats, investigative journalists, and transparency activists, it will also explore how different actors access information, and how their practices shape what becomes publicly visible or remains hidden. The project will scrutinise how a transparency mechanism designed to hold EU institutions accountable vis-à-vis citizens is, at times, transformed into an instrument of obfuscation at the level of the everyday.

Interdisciplinary in its research design, methodologically innovative, and committed to the ethos of public sociology, the project seeks to make a vital contribution not to understanding but, in pursuit of ISRF goals, challenging the regime of opacity that sustains Europe’s border regime.