Performing secrecy: hiding and obfuscation in Frontex’s pushbacks scandal

Making pushbacks public: Secrecy, material witnesses and devices of dis/appearance

“…Secrecy is performative (Glouftsios, 2023a; 2023b): it is crafted within different sociotechnical contexts and produces specific effects relating to those contexts. Walters (2021: 9) emphasizes the need to understand how state secrecy is (un)made by engaging with its formal and informal practices, the identities and hierarchies it produces, and the paradoxes, contradictions and controversies that it may engender.…”

“…There have been multiple controversies linked, in one way or another, to pushbacks in the Aegean Sea, but not every controversy revolved around secrecy. For instance, in some FSWG hearings, controversies concerned the legal uncertainties that presumably make it difficult to determine whether pushbacks are (il)legal (see Glouftsios 2023b). In this article, I focused on two specific controversies directly linked to attempts to obscure information that could function as evidence of Frontex’s involvement in or awareness of pushbacks.…”

The Age of Frontex: Banal Securitization and its Normalization in EUropean External(ized) Border Control

“…The themes were inspired by the theoretical framework's emphasis on the banal (Bigo, 2002;Billig, 1995), the methodological framework's focus on discursive constructions (Fairclough, 2015;Hacking, 1999), and literature on the de-politicizing effects of technical expertise (Campesi, 2022;Fjørtoft, 2022); the productive role of risk and crisis (Jeandesboz & Pallister-Wilkins, 2014Perkowski et al, 2023); gendered and raced constructions of vulnerability (Aradau, 2004;Williams, 2016); and the production of non-knowledge (Glouftsios, 2023b;Scheel, 2022). Billig (1995, p. 175) calls for more empirical research on the banal, including constructing "taxonomies of flaggings [of nationalism]… to list the different genres and their customary rhetorical strategies; and the extent of flaggings in different domains".…”

“…During its three months fact-finding investigation, the scrutiny group arranged a series of public hearings with representatives from the Commission, member states' border and coast guard authorities, Frontex's Management Board, the Consultative Forum, the Executive Director, the Fundamental Rights Officer, the EU Ombudsman, FRA, civil society organizations, the investigative journalists behind the allegations, and legal experts (see European Parliament, 2021b. While the scrutiny group's final report criticizes Frontex for lack of fundamental rights safeguards in its operations (European Parliament, 2021k), the Management Board's report from its own investigation refutes Frontex's involvement in pushbacks (Frontex, 2021f) by deploying a narrow interpretation of the principle of non-refoulement which obscures the right to asylum (see also Glouftsios, 2023aGlouftsios, , 2023b.…”

“…It also allowed me to show how more border control but less SAR is framed as in being in the best interest of refugees and migrants. The focus on the discursive practice of obscuring illustrated how the reports invisibilize as much as they visibilize the situation at the borders by leaving out any information relating to fundamental rights or deaths, which produces a form of non-knowledge (see Aradau, 2023;Glouftsios, 2023b;Scheel, 2022) on these issues that contributes to a situational unawareness of them in this field.…”