Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates the effects of EU border externalization on Moroccan internal categories of belonging. I argue that European racial anxieties animate anti-black racism against sub-Saharan migrants and Black Moroccans to control black mobility while facilitating non-black mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Studies on the externalization of European borders theorize how sovereignty stretches beyond nation-state territorial boundaries (Casas-Cortés, et al. 2010; Mountz 2011); analyzed how transnational border regimes are structured according to profit imperatives and in line with business models (Andersson 2014; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013); and have problematized humanitarian discourses as reinforcing rather than disrupting securitarian agendas (Walters 2010). Less explored is the relationship between European racial imaginaries, externalized bordering, and shifts in racial-social categories of belonging in third countries. While NGO, media and migrant accounts have documented pervasive racial profiling in border policing in third states such as Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, the process of racialization remains undertheorized (see Silverstein 2005 on immigrant racialization in Europe). This paper draws on eleven months of multi-sited ethnography among West and Central African migrant communities in Morocco to interrogate how European anxieties undergirding border externalization are producing racialized subjects across Moroccan social space. Engaging with transnational theorizations of race, this paper proceeds in three parts. Part one demonstrates how border externalization animates anti-black racism in the Maghreb as a means of restricting West and Central African migrants' mobility. Second, as blackness becomes synonymous with illegality, anti-blackness is a resource for other "Others" to claim European affinity as non-black. Finally, expanded meanings of blackness impact Moroccan society, hardening notions of racial otherness among citizens. By putting racial dynamics at the center of geopolitical analyses, this paper situates the externalized border in relation to longer histories of colonial knowledge-making and within trajectories of decolonial struggle.