Paper short abstract:

This paper situates EU border externalisation within extant processes of racialised exclusion in Mauritania. This deepened historical gaze is then broadened ethnographically. From here, the "illegality" produced by the border regime appears to be a variant of a more general postcolonial condition.

Paper long abstract:

Much of the literature on EU border externalisation restricts its analytical scope to the dialectical relationship between the border regime and its target: the irregular, Europe-bound migrant. While yielding diverse and valuable insights, such two-dimensional perspectives tend to neglect the deeper histories upon which the externalisation process builds, as well as the broader socio-spatial relations in which illegalised migrants are embedded. This paper addresses these two related gaps through a historically informed discussion of ethnographic data gathered in Mauritania during 11 months of fieldwork. It proceeds in two phases. Firstly, through a brief but focused discussion of colonial and postcolonial context, it highlights how border externalisation in Mauritania intervenes within older re-orderings of territorial sovereignty and processes of racialised inclusion and exclusion. It then proceeds with an analysis of ethnographic data gathered in various settings of the urban informal economy in Nouakchott, Nouadhibou and Rosso. At each of these sites, the experiential presence of the EU border is evident within the subjectivities of those it illegalises. It can take the form of memories of violence undergone elsewhere in the EU's extended southern buffer-zone, future aspirations to cross into Europe, or experiences of deportability and brutalisation at the hands of Mauritanian security forces. Situated within the context of the historical processes under discussion, however, these experiences reveal the "migrant illegality" produced by the EU border regime to be a surface-level manifestation of a more deep-seated postcolonial condition, one that transcends the national/other divide.