Thy Neighbor’s Gendarme? How Citizens of Buffer States in North Africa View EU Border Security Externalization

Abstract

To stop refugees and migrants, states have enlisted neighboring third countries to act as buffers, thereby outsourcing border security. With many sub-Saharan migrants transiting North Africa, these regimes there have increasingly served as the EU’s gendarme. Existing studies on the topic are state-centric, and little is known about the attitudes of citizens in buffer states. How do they view their state carrying out another’s border security? Leveraging an original, nationally-representative survey, we find that 66 percent of Morocco’s citizens oppose their country aiding border externalization. We advance an important initiative to “de-center” research on border externalization.