Let the right one in? On European migration authorities’ resistance to research

Abstract

This article documents efforts to gain access to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in migration control agencies across eight European countries: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. Building on repeated email exchanges, phone calls and fieldnotes from personal encounters between the researchers and state authorities, it traces and analyses state agencies’ decisions on whether or not to let researchers in to study their practices. We found that our access negotiations, including failed ones, proved analytically useful, as they drew our attention to the fragmented nature of the state agencies we attempted to study, which contrasts with the order‐making functions they claim to perform within the field of border and migration control. From our observations emerges an image of ‘the state’ as made up by many hands and ridden by internal frictions, conflicting interests and values, which contributes to rendering state practices unpredictable and opaque, also to the street‐level officials enforcing them. This opacity of state bureaucracy has profoundly disempowering effects for those trying to access it, even if it is not necessarily consciously constructed. Instead, we show how our access negotiations drew attention to the ongoing struggles over power, knowledge and order within the contested field of migration control.

Between suspicion, nicknames, and trust—renegotiating ethnographic access with Swedish border police

“…In comparison to the study of migrant individuals, or “clients” of the state, studying up the state also twists positions of vulnerability. The researcher often depends on the goodwill of one actor deciding on the access to an entire institution, due to the structures and hierarchies of state organisations (Lindberg and Borrelli, 2019); whereas, client-based studies may allow access negotiations on a more individual level. This contribution argues that institutions tasked with “truth finding” retain a particular interest to scrutinise the researcher.…”

“…According to Turner (1974; 1977), these moments are crucial for making sense of the observed and also bring forward the, at times, awkward positions of researchers in the field. Indeed, researchers are confronted with questions of trust, as well as insights into the interlocutors' processes of sense-making, in their everyday work (Borrelli, 2018; Lindberg and Borrelli, 2019). It is a constant balancing act to find out what and how much to disguise from whom (Nielsen and Malene, 2010; Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2015).…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…Notwithstanding public positions asserting openness and patency of operation, state bureaucracies have been long identified as conducing towards secrecy, which Weber (1978) asserted to be at their heart. Research to determine the patency and accessibility of migration control activity across Europe (Lindberg and Borelli 2019) indicates a climate of secrecy that enables state agencies and actors to adopt a cloak of coherent efficiency and purpose. In reality, the inconsistent, ambiguous, contradictory nature of actual bureaucratic practice reverberates with Das and Poole’s (2004) concept of the ‘margins of the state’, which draws attention to the ways in which the state comes into being through the production of borders, boundaries and marginalised subjects, while also highlighting the margins as sites where the assumed homogeneity, fixity and boundedness of ‘the state’ become destabilised.…”

Re‐searching access: what do attempts at studying migration control tell us about the state?

“…Annika Lindberg and Lisa Borrelli (, this issue) identify another intriguing aspect related to the field's endemic fragmentation. Some of the state actors they studied – notably police officers, state border guards and prison officers – did not fully or clearly associate their work as being part of the migration control field.…”