The technopolitics of EU externalised border control in the Mediterranean

The article asks whether the conventional geopolitical imagination of spatial blocks and borders as territorial lines of demarcation that underpins the externalisation of EU border enforcement in the Central Mediterranean holds in the face of the deployment of technological processes. By mobilising the notion of technopolitics, it argues that such processes are constitutive of externalisation, rather than a manifestation or an instrument thereof. Centering EUROSUR, the European Border Surveillance framework, as the locus of EU technopolitical border enforcement in the Mediterranean, the article shows how this framework materialises EU external borders as networks of heterogenous entities and as mobile areas, rather than as the dividing lines between spatial blocks found in conventional geopolitics.