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Consequences of European border externalization for everyday life in Tunisia. Photo: Unsplash.

Consequences of European border externalization for everyday life in Tunisia

In her research article Rings in the Water: Felt Externalisation in the Extended EU borderlands, Ahlam Chemlali presents how the ripple effects of European Borden externalization have transformed everyday life in the coastal town of Zarzis.

Last modified: 24.04.2023

Text: Charlotte Tybjerg Sørensen, Communications Officer
Photo: Unsplash

The article has recently been published in Geopolitics, which is an international and multidisciplinary journal devoted to contemporary research on geopolitics.

Building on ethnographic fieldwork among artisanal fishermen and actors involved in two migrant cemeteries in Zarzis, the article provides an understanding of entangled processes and of how violence and death co-exist in the extended borderlands of the EU.

- The felt and lived embeddedness and simultaneity of otherwise separately viewed policy issues is revealed through a focus on intersecting processes coming together in one place, Ahlam Chemlali says.

The article unpacks how externalisation translates into human rights abuses, environmental crisis, and death, and how these are distinctly intertwined.

Proposal of the concept 'felt externalisation'

- I propose the concept ‘felt externalisation’ as a theoretical contribution which ties together the three core themes: the actors, the environment, and the space. In doing so, my article brings together three different, yet interrelated dimensions of border externalisation that are still largely understudied in the literature, Ahlam Chemlali states.

By looking at externalisation from a spatial and geographically situated angle the paper makes not only an empirical but also a conceptual and theoretical contribution, by seeking to expand the empirical basis but also the very meaning of externalisation and its effects, in the extended EU borderland.

Read the article in Geopolitics.

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Ahlam Chemlali’s research profile 

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