In this open access book, Hassan Ould Moctar offers a much-needed conversation starter around the colonial legacies involved in the European Union's tendency to extend its own border and migration control operations into the Global South. This “border externalization” is the subject of a long thread of discussion within migration studies, yet its colonial inheritances are almost never addressed. Such oversights have yielded largely ahistorical, abstract understandings of the contemporary offshore operations of the EU border regime.

Here Moctar offers an important corrective through a close analysis of a telling case-study: namely, that of the West African state of Mauritania, which remains woefully understudied relative to its importance for EU externalisation strategies. As Moctar shows, Mauritania is representative of much of the Global South insofar as its recently constructed, Global-North-dictated concern with preventing “irregular migration” draws impetus from longstanding local socio-economic disparities, many of which owe to a deeper historic arc of colonial bordering and racialized population management. In order to trace how all this actually plays out in practice, Moctar offers fine-grained ethnographic accounts of the conditions and experiences of various 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, Moctar ultimately demonstrates how the EU border regime in the Global South coalescences between colonially inherited frameworks of racialized territorial belonging and the wasteful dynamics of contemporary postcolonial capitalism.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.