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ABSTRACT
As the number of asylum seekers grew, and flight stories became more complex, many Western governments deployed national research units, tasked with producing reliable Country of Origin Information (COI) to assist officials, judges and policy-makers in decision-making. Building on ethnographic research at Staatendokumentation, the COI unit at the Austrian Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum, the paper argues that country research practices can best be understood as ‘tinkering’ – e.g. making use of know-how, equipment, material sources at disposal to produce workable COI in conditions of uncertainty. The concept of tinkering is derived from science and technology studies (STS) and brings into view how the research professionals cobble together a workable version of reality with the methodologies and materials at hand. Moreover, it highlights how country research involves continuous modification and adjustments to satisfy the needs of the unwitting case officer as the end-user of COI reports. Finally, using insights from feminist science and technology studies, the paper shows how country experts foster care for some things – i.e. the workload of case officers – at the expense of others – i.e. the experience of the asylum seeker.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the special issue editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their engagement and thoughtful suggestions. Previous versions of this article have been previously presented at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST), the International Studies Association (ISA), and the European International Studies Association (EISA). I have benefited from feedback and discussions at (online) research seminars of the FOLLOW (November 2020) and Security Flows (September 2020) projects. Thanks to Marieke de Goede and Claudia Aradau, respectively, for organising these events. And for the feedback from all the participants, including, but not limited to, Rocco Bellanova, Stephan Scheel, Georgios Glouftsios, Tasniem Anwar, Anneroos Planqué-van Hardeveld, Pieter Lagerwaard, Esmé Bosma. I would also like to thank Martin Coward and Aoileann Ní Mhurchú for their feedback and support, and for supervising my research project at the University of Manchester. Special thanks go to Staatendokumentation for providing access to research, fact-checking and commenting on a late version of this article. The research benefitted from grant and support from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. I am also grateful to the European New School of Digital Studies, European University Viadrina, for supporting the final revision process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The observational data was processed into anonymised field notes. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and anonymised. All participants gave their approval by signing consent forms.
2 Training modules from the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) (June 2019) and the Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation (ACCORD) (May 2016).
3 As I have noted elsewhere (van der Kist, Dijstelbloem, and de Goede Citation2019), COI units can be viewed as what Latour (Citation1987) calls ‘centres of calculation’, not only in the way circulating references made possible (scientific) knowledge production, but also its colonial legacy of knowing (and acting on) non-European territories.
4 While a significant proportion of the queries are from judges from the Federal Administrative Court processing asylum applications at the second (or third) instance, this chapter focuses primarily on the interactions COI researchers with case officers at the first instance.
5 For data protection reasons, all of the examples in this paper are fictional and cannot be traced back to a real COI queries.
6 Group interview with COI researchers from CEDOCA, online, 4 April 2019.
7 Fieldwork notes.
8 Fieldwork notes.
9 Fieldwork notes.
10 Fieldwork notes.
11 Interview Staatendokumentation COI researcher 27 March 2019.
12 Fieldwork notes.
13 Fieldwork notes.
14 Fieldwork notes.