Effective Protection or Effective Combat? EU Border Control and North Africa

Abstract

This chapter traces and conceptualizes the evolution of the EurAfrican borderscapes during the 2000s. It points out how a popular, but flawed, perspective that sees borders through a closed-system perspective is responsible for much knowledge production and policy-making in European border politics, including the critical image of Fortress Europe. This image, however, fails, it is argued, to appraise the border regime’s functionality as a transnational network of control nodes. The chapter explains how the traditional conceptualization of forced migration, although important, has viewed border control as a response to forced migration and has therefore not seen how the border control regime in itself is also causing forced migration. The various ways in which states’ border control yields displacement is labelled border-induced displacement and explored. The chapter thus traces the longstanding European externalization of detention camps to Gaddafi’s Libya, the Italian–Libyan Friendship Treaty of 2008, and how it fed into policy driven by the Dutch, British and Danish governments, which had pursued variations of such externalization of European control and responsibility since the 1980s. It also details the kind of issue linkages characterizing the politics of the EurAfrican borderscapes. Finally, and continuously, the chapter interrogates migrants’ humanitarian conditions in the EurAfrican borders.