Neither opaque nor transparent: A transdisciplinary methodology to investigate datafication at the EU borders

Abstract

In 2020, the European Union announced the award of the contract for the biometric part of the new database for border control, the Entry Exit System, to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of publicly available documents that show what kind of technologies are being implemented, for how much money, and by whom, there has been limited engagement with digital methods in this field. Moreover, critical border and security scholarship has largely focused on qualitative and ethnographic methods. Building on a data feminist approach, we propose a transdisciplinary methodology that goes beyond binaries of qualitative/quantitative and opacity/transparency, examines power asymmetries and makes the labour of coding visible. Empirically, we build and analyse a dataset of the contracts awarded by two European Union agencies key to its border management policies – the European Agency for Large-Scale Information Systems (eu-LISA) and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). We supplement the digital analysis and visualisation of networks of companies with close reading of tender documents. In so doing, we show how a transdisciplinary methodology can be a device for making datafication ‘intelligible’ at the European Union borders.

Disassembling the actant: A valediction to actor-network theory

“…Many social scientists interested in big data and AI in the last decade have been heavily influenced by Latour's work. Latour's lexicon of associations, assemblages, devices and infrastuctures suffuses discussions in this field (Amicelle, 2022;Aradau and Blanke, 2015;Valdivia et al, 2022). The implication is that AIs and their algorithms are actants which configure emergent tech networks.…”

“…The implication is that AIs and their algorithms are actants which configure emergent tech networks. For instance, in their work on EU borders, Ana Valdivia et al have examined the increasing role of datafication and AI ( Valdivia et al, 2022). AI programmes have played an important role in processing data.…”

Borders have always been artificial: Migration, data and AI

“…This AI common sense has been produced by state, private and humanitarian actors. As the European Commission contracted consultancy company Deloitte to write a report on opportunities for using AI technologies for border control and migration (Deloitte, 2020), consultancy companies like Deloitte and Accenture also held contracts from eu‐LISA, the EU Agency for the Operational Management of Large‐Scale IT Systems (Valdivia et al, 2022). Through the circulation of knowledge, practices and financing, AI has become the ready‐made answer to border and migration governance.…”