ABSTRACT
In so-called Frontex Joint Operation, Frontex, police authorities, and further actors carry out border control missions at the external borders of the EU. This includes the creation and distribution of reports, the exchange of data, and the production of knowledge across organizational boundaries. Based on an ethnography of the Frontex Joint Operation “Poseidon” in Greece conducted between 2016 and 2018, this chapter analyzes the circulation of data as a multi-layered configuration and offers a typology of infrastructural coordination by artifacts, formats, and practices. By intertwining the question of how data travel and the channels and media that make them travel, this chapter offers both an analysis of the governance of European border control and a conceptual heuristic for analyzing and reconstructing heterogeneous, fragmented, and punctually interconnected infrastructural configurations. European border operations thus produce bureaucratic orders and accountabilities of nation-states while at the same time enacting an interorganizational and transnational form of technobureaucratic governance.
