The constitutive outside: EU border externalisation, regional histories, and social dynamics in the Senegal River Valley

Abstract

This article situates the EU border externalisation process within the regional history and social dynamics of the Senegal River Valley. It does so by drawing from fieldwork data gathered in the Mauritanian border town of Rosso, a crucial node within the architecture of the EU border regime in West Africa. By ethnographically detailing the workings of the border crossing and the experiences of illegalised migrant workers in the town, the article argues that the externalisation process is conditioned by the histories and socio-spatial dynamics of the regions in which it unfolds. In the case of Rosso, migrants who are elsewhere illegalised by the border regime appear equally marked by a regional history of racialised expulsions and accumulation by dispossession. As regards the border itself, the infrastructure of externalisation serves to uphold the colonial conversion of the Senegal River into a territorial dividing line. At the same time, however, the situated socio-spatial dynamics of this locale force compromises on this infrastructure, thereby acting upon and transforming the externalisation process in its practical unfolding.