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Much scholarly and journalistic attention has focused on the increasing centrality of questions around border controls, territory, and the management of human mobility in contemporary international politics. Other than the globalization mania in the last decades of the 20th century and early 2000s seemed to indicate, there is no end in sight to the territorial restriction of human mobility. Thereby, access to rights and resources is also tied to national territories, and the citizenship status that bind us to them.
Instead, and as attentive critical scholars of International Relations have been arguing, we are seeing an intensification of migration control and a proliferation and shoring up of border infrastructure and technologies. Borders have stretched both inward and outward. If US citizen Snoop Dogg is stopped, controlled, and arrested by US Border Patrol while driving through Texas and without actually crossing a national border, it becomes difficult not to speak of an overstretch of the border. At the same time, elite agents of BORTAC, a highly militarized special unit of the US Department for Homeland Security, and agents of the European Boarder and Coast Guard Agency FRONTEX are active in several dozen countries to collect data about, steer, and stop any migration towards the territory whose sovereign they work for. As Etienne Balibar argued, in the contemporary condition, it really seems like the border is everywhere.
But if the border is truly everywhere and if it is as central to international politics as many critical IR scholars say, the increasing overstretch of border politics must have deeply transformative consequences for societies around the world. To understand why this overstretch is taking place and what it does, I study the phenomenon of border externalization and the production of so-called transit migration states. The empirical sites of my study are Mexico and Turkey, both of which neighbor the major forces of border externalization, the US and the EU, and host migratory routes these two actors seek to interrupt.
Theoretically and methodologically, I seek to push beyond the micro-level analysis of border studies that dominated the literature in IR in the last two decades. Rather than addressing how specific border security policies and programs are justified, which bureaucratic cultures give rise to them or how they are implemented legally, I use a spatial approach to understand what happens to a place once the border is externalized. I turn to a Lefebvrian understanding of the production of space to analyze the transformation of political spaces through borders, and the conditions that give rise to it.
After outlining the history of externalized migration management and the conditions of its emergence as a state technology in the 19th century, the thesis turns towards a study of the contemporary dynamics of externalization. One aspect of my thesis analyses how bordering processes can serve as a spatial fix for labor shortages through the differential integration of negatively racialized migrants into local political economies. In both Mexico and Turkey, combinations of legally precarious “temporary protection statuses” and internal security practices immobilize migrants within the transit state and produce them as a cheap source of labor. By studying this phenomenon, my thesis also contributes to broader questions about the role of borders in capitalist accumulation.
A historical chapter of my thesis traces the emergence of “remote control” of migration, a precursor of externalization, back to the 19th century and studies the historical conditions the give rise to the almost cyclical emergence of externalized border control. One of my arguments is that this emergence of “border security” and its regulatory function should not be located in the end of the Cold War or 9/11, but in the consolidation of a capitalist world market and a postcolonial order of strictly culturalized nation-states.
The last part of my thesis analyses how citizens and migrants symbolically and politically reappropriate the representational space of the transit state.