After Border Externalization: Migration, race, and labour in Mauritania

In After Border Externalization, 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.

About the speaker

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Focusing on West Africa and the Sahara, his research bridges the fields of anthropology and development studies through the study of migration and borders. In particular, he is interested in how the contemporary illegalisation of migration interacts with the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, uneven development processes, and conflict and displacement dynamics. 

He holds a PhD in Development Studies which he obtained from SOAS and has held teaching and research positions in SOAS and the LSE. 

Chair

• Paolo Novak, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, SOAS University of London

Discussant

• Adam Hanieh, Professor of Political Economy and Global Development, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS), University of Exeter

This event is part of the SOAS Global Development Seminar Series, jointly hosted with the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies.