Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the normalization of supranational regions as ideal units of refugee governance while arguing the border externalization literature could better assess migration control's broader spatial logics, adopt historical analysis, and engage with seminal immigration debates.

Paper long abstract:

This paper demonstrates that since the 1970s, influential state and non-state actors have sought to normalize supranational regions as the ideal politico-territorial units of forced displacement governance. Border externalizations have been part of this grander geopolitical strategy. Indeed, the interdisciplinary literature on border externalization has shown how states deploy extra-territorial migration controls to transnationally confine, delay, and otherwise deter potential migrants in source and transit countries. Such work is important and should continue. Yet I argue the border externalization literature could be productively broadened in three ways. Firstly, border externalization scholarship could better analyze how bordering reflects broader spatial logics and projects. Secondly, border externalization research could better incorporate historical analysis. And finally that border externalization scholarship could better engage with seminal moral and ethical debates surrounding immigration and border control. I make these claims while showing how the supranational region has been discursively produced as a spatial diagram of asylum and refugee governance, with border externalizations deployed to confine asylum-seekers to their 'region of origin'. Despite growing advocacy for 'regional solutions' to asylum seeking, explanations for why regions are ideal - what regions do or solve, exactly - are often opaque or altogether absent. As such, I also will analyze supranational regions as geographic units of forced displacement governance and how this regionalism relates to the major normative debates in immigration and border control.