After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania

In this open access book, Hassan Ould Moctar offers an original analysis of the European Union's tendency to extend its border and migration control operations into the Global South. Rather than approaching this “border externalization” in analytical isolation, he details how it relates to history and social relations in the West African state of Mauritania. The political concern with policing “irregular migration” emerged relatively recently in Mauritania as a result of EU policy cooperation. But as Ould Moctar shows, it intervenes within a deeper historic arc of colonial bordering and racialized population management, while also upholding capitalism's tendency to cast people out of its development. To trace how this plays out in practice, he offers fine-grained ethnographic accounts of the conditions of migrant workers who have come up against the violence of externalisation at various points in their trajectories. By tying these narratives to equally formative experiences of urban informality and rural dispossession, he demonstrates how the EU border regime intervenes within a colonially inherited framework of racialized territorial belonging and capitalism's wasteful dynamics in the Global South.

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