Ordering EU internal security: Information sharing, code tables, and epistemic stabilisation

This paper examines how EU internal security cooperation is sustained through the everyday maintenance of the Schengen Information System's (SIS) code tables, the classificatory system that enables cross-border information exchange throughout Europe. Drawing on extensive expert interviews, the analysis shows how officers, technicians, and database specialists work towards what I call epistemic stabilisation. By this I mean a socio-technical process in which practitioners align heterogeneous national knowledge systems and periodically reconstitute categories so that information can circulate across divergent environments. Analytically, epistemic stabilisation captures both the labour required to keep shifting realities in sync with classificatory order and the performative effects of this work, as decisions about which distinctions matter directly shape what can be recorded and governed through the SIS. By tracing how practitioners negotiate the boundaries of categories, incorporate emerging object types, and adapt classificatory regimes in response to infrastructural reforms, the paper shows how stability in EU internal security is a provisional and ongoing task. In doing so, it positions the SIS code tables and their governance as a profoundly political site in which the epistemic foundations of European internal security are continually worked towards.