Re-Interpreting Knowledge, Expertise and EU Governance: The Case of Security Research Policy & Its Implications for Migration

This paper examines how ideas about what is to be governed, how and by whom, are made sense of in European Union governance. It interrogates the complex relationships of knowledge generation, knowledge circulation, expertise and policymaking in security research policy, and identifies the implications of these relationships for interpreting EU migration governance more widely. In security research policy, mētis, or practical knowledge (Scott  1998), has enabled major European corporations to assert a privileged discursive and political position in the ‘linked ecologies’ (Abbott 2005) of formal scientific research, product development and EU policymaking. This case demonstrates the partial integration of elite discourses with scientific rationalities into EU governance related to migration. The generation of knowledge and expertise is articulated in governance practices in ways that imagine and enact a politically limited, and strikingly little contested, version of ‘the’ EU. It is a Union in which migrants are paradoxically both seemingly absent, and at the same time, targeted as an object of governance.