Racial borderscapes, coloniality and migrations in south Tunisia An ethnographic case at the gates of Europe

Keywords: Tunisia, Borderscapes, racialization, migration, humanitarism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

During the last decades, Tunisia has been the scene of multiple geopolitical, socio-economic and racial transformations that have reconfigured its coasts as borderscapes (Rajaram and Warr, 2007) between the central Mediterranean and the Sahara Desert: spaces instrumentalized by the current EU border regime as violent and treacherous geographies for the regulation of new migrations from sub-Saharan and West Africa.
I thus propose that the constant militarization of Europe's external border in the Mediterranean, the uprisings of the "Tunisian Revolution" in 2010, as well as the Civil War in Libya in 2011, have been some of the main entangled global, regional and local processes that have shaped the Tunisian South into a conflictive border laboratory where violent and re-actualized policies and practices have immobilized migrant populations racialized as Black and threatening in precarious humanitarian shelters.
Heir to a historical slave tradition, the Tunisian modern state have favored the reactivation of a historical anti-Black policing culture (Saucier& Woods, 2014) -now as black migrants- in the current society, exposing them to premature forms of social and physical death through practices of deportation, humanitarian abandonment and extreme violence. Based on ethnographic evidence collected, I propose to analyze the specific effects of the racialized production of the border regime in Tunisia on the bodies and subjectivities of dozens of migrants in Zarzis and Medenine (south Tunisia), and more specifically, the case of 36 Ivorian migrants deported from their place of residence to the Libyan-Tunisian border, being abandoned for a potential death in the desert.