EU External Border Policy and Postcolonial Capitalism in Mauritania

Much of the literature on EU border externalisation focuses upon illegalised Europe-bound migrants (eg Andersson, 2014; Bialasiewicz, 2012; Casas-Cortes et al., 2015; De Genova, 2017; Tazzioli, 2016; Vives, 2017). Such approaches offer diverse insights, but they can obscure the contexts in which EU external border policies operate. Drawing upon 11 months of PhD fieldwork in Mauritania, this project examines the interaction between the externalisation of EU migration controls and more deeply embedded regional migratory histories, development trends, and associated webs of social relations in the country. To investigate this encounter, I carried out semi-structured interviews with numerous actors within the domain of migration and border management, as well as prolonged ethnographic investigations of the urban informal economy in which many migrants in Mauritania get by. This gave rise to an analysis that foregrounds the historical and social context in which EU external border policies operate. As such, my PhD rectifies an identified Eurocentric tendency within the literature on EU migration and border policy (Cuttitta, 2020:3; De Genova, 2013; Garelli & Tazzioli, 2013:247; Van Baar, 2016), as well as within critical migration and border studies more broadly (Berriane et al., 2015; New Keywords Collective, 2015:60; Korvensyra, 2017; Walters, 2015:11).

Three contributions emerge from this analysis. Firstly, the thesis questions the assumptions of novelty that inform many analyses of EU border externalisation, assumptions often grounded in an erasure of historical context. When situated within a deeper historical trajectory, the EU border regime's external operations appear to be conditioned by a shift in territorial organisation that took place during the colonial era in the region. Moreover, EU external border policy is animated by the same asymmetric centre-periphery dynamics that facilitated this colonial shift in territorial organisation. Secondly, while the externalisation literature has drawn attention to the paradoxical fact that EU external border policy produces the very migrant illegality that it claims to prevent (Andersson, 2014; Casas-Cortes et al., 2014; Cobarrubias, 2019; De Haas, 2015), this illegality is often depicted in an isolated fashion, removed from the social relations in which it is necessarily embedded. My PhD shifts this emphasis by analysing how migrant illegality fits within the social relations and structures that have emerged from the history outlined above. From this perspective, the migrant labour that is illegalised by the border regime appears to be a more general and deep-seated feature of contemporary capitalism.

Lastly, the two empirical contributions outlined above together generate a theoretical contribution. The PhD thesis grounds its critique of the externalisation literature in a wider debate between Marxist and postcolonial scholars around the issue of Eurocentrism. The conclusion chapter overcomes the impasse that often arises between these two perspectives, arguing that the means by which those illegalised by the EU border regime make sense of their social condition point toward a non-Eurocentric universalism. In this way, the project addresses not only the Eurocentrism of the literature on EU borders, but also highlights more general ways of moving beyond this phenomenon.