Abstract Literature on European migration management often locates the emergence of restrictive and hostile migration control in the late twentieth century. While critical scholarship has documented the harms produced by these developments, migration governance is frequently approached through linear narratives of policy development that treat current measures as historically novel and detached from colonial pasts, leaving race, racialization, and coloniality marginal. This article challenges this racial and colonial aphasia by advancing rehistoricization as both a methodological and analytical intervention. It argues that the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum is best understood not as the outcome of a progressive policy trajectory, but of a longer European history of colonial governance that has structured mobility through racialized exclusion, emergency rule, and delegated control. Focusing on the Crisis Regulation and the International Partnerships Pillar, the article rehistoricizes emergency governance and border externalization, tracing their genealogies to colonial practices of exception, containment, and indirect rule. By embedding the Pact within the longue durée of European colonial power, the article shows how measures presented as policy innovation reproduce imperial modalities of governing unwanted mobility, offering a historically grounded framework for understanding EU migration governance as a site of racialized continuity rather than technocratic novelty.
Myriam Fotou (Wed,) studied this question.