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Where is Settler Colonialism?

Emilie Cameron
This essay considers both the limits and necessity of mobilizing settler colonial frameworks in the contemporary moment. It traces the rise of Settler Colonial Studies as the dominant framework for making sense of colonial relations in Canada and considers the limits of this framework for understanding colonization in Inuit Nunangat, where the settler state’s interest in dispossession, extraction, and proletarianization have played out differently than in southern Canada. Guided by Aimé Césaire’s directive to ask, again and again, what colonization is, I consider why Settler Colonial Studies frameworks are so readily mobilized in the study of northern Canada but are hyperpoliticized when they are applied to Israel/Palestine, why Inuit theories of colonization barely figure in Qallunaaq research about the North, and what this means for theorizing colonialism in the current conjuncture.

The Mediterranean as a Laboratory of Border Externalization: Critical Perspectives from the South

Ilaria Giglioli and Timothy Raeymaekers
Despite the growing prominence of decolonial approaches to borders and migration, the field of border externalization studies remains in need of a critical re-thinking of its main paradigms in order to move beyond state-centrist, Eurocentric and presentist approaches. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, this themed section develops an approach to border externalization grounded in the Global South. In diverse sites such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Turkey, the papers discuss politics of control and practices or resistance, the multiplication of sites of bordering within the nation-state, the role of global networks of migration management and surveillance, as well as the role of race and migration in the national political debate. Drawing on the field of Critical Border Studies, in particular the concepts of ‘borderscapes’, ‘border entanglements’, and ‘border work’, the papers effectively center the multiple agencies, locations, and scales involved in bordering. They also contextualize border externalization within longer histories of imperialism, colonialism and anti-black racism, and ground their scholarship in participatory and grounded forms of research. Taken in conjunction, the themed section demonstrates the empirical and conceptual innovations offered by grounded ethnographic research on bordering in the global south.

Autonomous Migrant Mobilisations in Libya and (Counter-)Externalisation: Transnational Spatial Configurations of Solidarity

Paolo Cuttitta
The restrictive, violent evolution of the Libyan migration and border regime has been strongly determined by the externalisation efforts of European policymakers. Yet self-organised initiatives of migrants in Libya, and the more-than-local solidarity spaces they establish, generate counter-externalisation dynamics aimed at transforming such a regime and steering it in the opposite direction. To shed light on these dynamics, the paper provides an overview of self-organised forms of protest and mobilisation of people on the move in Libya in the last two decades. While these migrant initiatives result from endogenous forms of solidarity, they also inspire and trigger different forms of exogenous, pro-migrant solidarity from different categories of actors across places. Thus, solidarity follows multiple directions and creates specific solidarity spaces at different scales. Spatialities and directionalities produced by the interplay between solidarity and more-than-local migrant or pro-migrant mobilisations can be conceptualised as acts of counter-externalisation, reacting to the externalised regime of migration containment that has been established in Libya since the early 2000s. The paper first introduces the Libyan migration regime from the perspective of European border externalisation. Then, it reconstructs the history of migrant mobilisations in Libya from the Gaddafi period to the present day, including more recent developments such as the establishment of the movement “Refugees in Libya” and its international support network “Alliance with Refugees in Libya.” The concluding section analyses the spatial configurations of solidarity emerging from migrant mobilisations in Libya against the background of European border externalisation.

Externalizing Anti-Blackness: Racialized Immobilization and Migrant Counter-Archives in Tunisia’s Borderlands of Abandonment

Edgar Córdova Morales
This article examines the EU’s border externalization in Tunisia as a racialized project of governance rooted in longer genealogies of anti-Blackness and exclusion. Drawing on feminist, embodied ethnography, it traces how fast and slow violence—expulsions, bureaucratic immobilization, and everyday racism—govern and devalue Black migrant life. Yet through practices of care, documentation, and solidarity, migrants produce counter-archives that make this violence legible and contest its legitimacy. The article reveals externalization as a mechanism of racial domination and a terrain of political presence.

Dispersal Politics as Internal Bordering: Migration Governance in the Euro-Moroccan Border Regime

Sofia El Arabi
This article examines migration control in Morocco beyond the spectacle of fences and visible border infrastructures, foregrounding the spatial and temporal rationalities that have structured the dispersal of West and Central African migrants since 2015 within the evolving Euro-Moroccan border regime. Drawing on participatory action research conducted between 2017 and 2020 in informal camps and urban margins, it traces the trajectories of 215 individuals forcibly relocated from northern border cities to peripheral and medium-sized cities in central and southern Morocco. The article conceptualizes dispersal as a biopolitical technology of internal bordering and a central modality of migration politics that redistributes control across national territory, contributing to the territorial thickening of the Euro-Moroccan border and producing forms of political and legal invisibility. It further shows how dispersal participates in the racialized production of migrant illegality across differentiated urban spaces. Through an analysis of Tiznit (south) and Taza (northeast), the article demonstrates how dispersal reconfigures urban governance, embeds precarity within local spatial orders, and fragments migratory trajectories into prolonged conditions of marginality and tactical survival. By shifting the analytical lens toward the southern side of the Mediterranean border regime, the article shows how European migration externalization is internalized and territorially reworked through locally situated practices of mobility control, materializing in a fragmented geography of forced mobility that migrants navigate and contest.

Building Borders in the City: The Turkish Government's Plan to “Dilute” the Migrant Presence in Urban Areas through the Example of the Altındağ Metropolitan District in Ankara

Cosimo Pica
This article intends to read the effects of European border externalization policies from the “south,” taking into consideration Turkey’s autonomy and local dynamics in bordering processes, which merge and intertwine with EU ones. Based on ethnographic fieldwork during 2022 and 2023 in the Altındağ metropolitan district of Ankara, I analyse how this urban borderland became the focal point of governmental practices and narratives after the anti-Syrian lynching that exploded in August 2021. An event that marked a new direction in the government’s migration policies with the issuing of the so-called “dilution plan” which establishes a maximum threshold of 20 % of foreign residents in the neighborhoods of metropolitan areas like Ankara and in 63 other provinces with a huge migrant presence. I maintain that the Turkish government’s “dilution plan” highlights how the border is above all a mobile threshold that marks a hierarchy between people within the same space, creating mechanisms of “differential inclusion”. With this study, I aim to discuss how bordering processes and practices not only reconfigure the Mediterranean space but also mark the urban spaces of the countries involved, such as Turkey.