Contribution short abstract:

Cooperative deterrence and border externalisation are legally complex and involve an entangled and transnational web of actors from states, IOs, and EU agencies. Anthropologists should describe the intricacies of these processes but also characterise them in terms of North-South border (in)justice.

Contribution long abstract:

Cooperative deterrence is composed of measures and policies designed “to conscript countries of origin and of transit to effect migration control on behalf of the developed world” (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Hathaway, 2015). It has become the dominant paradigm enabling Europe to de facto suspend the right to asylum, without having to renounce its duties under international law. Processes of cooperative deterrence are legally complex and involved an entangled and transnational web of actors from states, international organisations, and EU agencies. As anthropologists of policy and border regimes, understanding and describing these processes presents us with a challenge: how to articulate the complex politico-legal border assemblages that produce these systematic exclusions without getting drowned in technicalities? How to trace the construction of these policies of exclusion in the variety of locations where they are designed and implemented? And how to precisely communicate the effects of these assemblages on refugee law for example, without reinstating the dichotomies of legitimate refugees versus illegitimate economic migrants? The contribution to this roundtable emphasises the need to name cooperative deterrence not as a cooperative endeavour to improve border management but as an indefinite suspension of the right to seek asylum (understood as commons and not just as legal protection). Following Achiume’s (2019) conceptualisation of migration from the Third to the First World, as decolonisation, this paper further emphasises that beyond technical understandings of legal regimes of asylum and their suspension, there is a pressing need to reconceptualise North-South migration as a question of historical justice.