Approaching the Council of the EU and Member States’ Permanent Representations as ethnographic field sites

What can ethnographic approaches reveal about the Council of the EU’s decision-making process? This article explores how ethnographic methods contribute to the study of the Council’s inner workings, drawing on a literature review as well as a series of observations stemming from a participant observation stay in an EU permanent representation. While also identifying a series of challenges, the article underlines two main avenues for future ethnographic research of the Council and Member States’ permanent representations, namely the study of negotiation practices and EU interinstitutional power dynamics.