“It’s like a prison”: EU externalization, racial capitalism, and anti-Black racism in EU–Tunisia cooperation on migration

Abstract In this article, I argue racialized EU externalization interacts with and reinforces the anti-Black racism within Tunisia’s border regime. I analyze EU–Tunisia relations through the lens of racial capitalism, arguing that Tunisia’s cooperation with external actors, including on migration matters, is connected to maintaining models of capitalist accumulation and punishing dissent. The aim of this contemporary cooperation is not to prevent the mobility of migrants entirely, but to limit, control, and exploit it. Both the EU and Tunisia suspend different racialized migrant groups in a situation of irregularity and precarity to create and maintain exploitable labor, while avoiding the political unpopularity of “regularizing” migrants. We are seeing the violent and deadly consequences of intensified racialized border regimes both within Europe, in the context of a contemporary crisis of neoliberalism, and in post-transition Tunisia, faced with its own overlapping social, political, and economic crises. Thus, by exploring the entanglements of racialized bordering practices that operate across the Mediterranean, I go beyond reductive state-by-state analysis, revealing EU externalization as part of a broader project of racialized bordering essential to global racial capitalism.