Over Land and Sea: NGOs/CSOs and EU Border Externalisation Along the Central Mediterranean Route

Abstract

This paper looks at the Central Mediterranean Route, and assesses the relationship between migration-related NGOs/CSOs and EU border externalisation in this liminal, transnational, mobile spatial configuration. In so doing, it introduces the notion of anti-externalisation, with its variants counter-externalisation and counter-delocalisation, identifying relevant practices among NGOs/CSOs. The paper further explores connections between anti-externalisation activities on land and at sea, and analyses how the different spaces, places and contexts along the Central Mediterranean Route impact on the relationship between externalisation and NGOs/CSOs. The terrestrial and maritime environments, with their political and legal specificities, provide opportunities for and obstacles to both externalisation and anti-externalisation policies and practices. NGOs/CSOs can accept or oppose the relevant constraints, and exploit the place-specific opportunities. While some of these actors support externalisation, others oppose it through forms of counter-externalisation (resorting to the same spatial specificities of which externalisation policies take advantage) or counter-delocalisation (transnational, transborder and de-territorialised practices similar to those used by externalisation actors). The paper also underscores the itinerant character of NGOs/CSOs’ anti-externalisation action, which, like governmental control, adopts the route perspective and follows migrants’ trajectories over land and sea (also resorting to the air dimension to increase monitoring capacities) in order to support their right to mobility.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maribel Casas-Cortés, Sebastián Cobarrubias and Paolo Novak, as well as Maurice Stierl, for insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. My sincere thanks also go to the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis and the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et sociales (CEDEJ) in Cairo for hosting me during fieldwork. Research on Libya was funded by a grant from the European Union’s research and innovation programme ‘Horizon 2020’ (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n. 846320). Research on Tunisia and Egypt was funded by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) through grant number 016.130.061.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Just like the concept of ‘externalisation’, the categories of ‘transit’ and ‘origin’ always assume a certain (in this case Euro-centric) perspective and directionality (see Cuttitta 2020 on externalisation; Düvell 2012 on transit).

2. Interviews were carried out only after the interviewees were provided with detailed written and/or oral information on the research project, on how the interview would be carried out, as well as on their rights, and after they gave their consent to being interviewed. All sensitive aspects of the research have been approved by the ethics advisor and the data protection officer of the University Sorbonne Paris Nord.

3. Thus, the Central Mediterranean route is not even exclusively ‘central’, given the role played by Eastern Mediterranean countries such as Egypt and Turkey.

4. With regard to Libya, this paper only refers to so-called ‘official’ DCs. Other, unofficial DCs exist in the country, but IOs and NGOs/CSOs cannot access them.

5. This was also the case of another CIR initiative, which was negotiated and carried out with the Italian government: a humanitarian corridor for 108 Eritrean asylum seekers, who were allowed to leave Tripoli on a regular flight to Italy in March 2011, at the outbreak of the war. However, humanitarian corridors can hardly be seen as anti-externalisation acts: first, because they are organised together with externalising governments; second, because they select people based on the vulnerability criterion, and thus perpetuate those binaries (‘deserving’ vs. ‘undeserving’, ‘forced’ vs. ‘economic’ migrants) that provide an important ground for externalised border management (Scheel and Ratfisch 2014; Valluy 2007).

6. This changed, at least temporarily, while this paper was under review. Since 5 March 2022 the Libyan authorities have denied Sea Watch permission to enter the Libyan flight information region and thus fly over the purported Libyan SAR region.