Itinerant deathworlds: Spanish border externalisation and the necroborder

In 2006 Spain spearheaded European border externalisation, re-spatialising its border into a peripatetic political institution to systematically intercept ‘irregular’ migrants. This paper conducts a necropolitical analysis of Spain’s border externalisation projects by reviewing migrant mortality/disappearance data and conducting a discourse analysis of first-hand migrant accounts with the dislocated bordering apparatus. I posit that Spain’s border externalisation efforts create ‘itinerant deathworlds’: a dislocated form of necropower that follows migrants while they are in transit. Post-mortem violence and psychic trauma cause itinerant deathworlds to linger long after migration journeys have ended, projecting them into indeterminate spatio-temporal scales.