Paper short abstract:

The paper develops a grounded ethnography of global processes of border fortification "from below" in Tunisia and Mexico, arguing that following networks of people on the move can shed light on how similar strategies of border delimitation and contestation develop in disparate borderlands

Paper long abstract:

Tunisia has long been a key country for the experimentation of EU migration control policies. More recently, it has become a key node in violent and treacherous geographies that immobilize, illegalize and potentially expel new racialized West African migrants.

Drawing on a transatlantic ethnography in Medenine (Tunisia) and Tapachula (Mexico) between 2018 and 2022, we argue that the reinforcement of Europe's externalized borders in Tunisia, and more broadly in the central Mediterranean, has influenced recent migratory flows of thousands of West Africans across the southern Mexican border. This contemporary escape route to the Americas has reconfigured Mexico's southern border into a global epicenter of new struggles for migrant mobility under a global genealogy of colonial violence in terms of anti-black policing and dispossession.

Based on scholarly contributions on race and postcolonialism, we analyze protests, anti-racist demonstrations, hunger strikes and the relentless quest for new migratory routes to cross Mexico by West African migrants in situations of forced immobility and precariousness. Subsequently, we focus on how these border struggles in Mexico inspired immobilized West African migrants in Medenine through social networks, news and rumors among networks of mutual acquaintances, making them feel part of a broader movement against a global border regime. At a conceptual level, the paper thus develops a grounded ethnography of global processes of border fortification “from below”, and argues that following networks of people on the move can shed light on how similar strategies of bordering and forms of contestation of borders develop in disparate geographies worldwide.