Toward decolonial practice

Throughout this article, I incorporate data collected in interviews conducted between July 2019 and January 2023. I interviewed Tunisian journalists, academics, NGO workers, as well as political elites and foreign diplomats. Due to ethical commitments and the demands of the ethics committee, interviews were fully anonymized to protect participants. Given Tunisia’s increasingly authoritarian practices since July 2021, including arbitrary arrests, protecting safety was prioritized. Sometimes compelling information was omitted to avoid jigsaw identification. While I have been researching anti-Black racism for several years, escalating violence after February 2023 made research particularly sensitive. Following do-no-harm principles, I chose not to interview irregular migrants directly, relying on civil society organizations.

Following decolonial methodological principles, I approached interviews as dialogical encounters with knowledge producers (Thambinathan and Kinsella Reference Thambinathan and Anne Kinsella2021). Tunisian scholars and activists offered sophisticated analyses of racial capitalism—analyses informing my theoretical framework rather than serving as empirical examples. Challenging what Grosfoguel (Reference Grosfoguel2007) terms the “coloniality of knowledge,” whereby Southern voices provide raw material for Northern theory, I treated my interlocutors as theorists whose understandings of racial capitalism, state violence, and resistance shaped my analysis. Unfortunately, there were occasions when participants requested, even after being told of the anonymization, to be named, but I have not been able to do so due to the demands of my ethics committee. This risks exploiting knowledge and insights from Tunisians without accrediting them (Godfrey-Faussett Reference Godfrey-Faussett2022), thus reinforcing already significant issues surrounding coloniality and knowledge extraction in the social sciences (N. Brown Reference BrownN.d). Such debates are not the purpose of this paper; however, my compliance with the demands of the relevant ethics committee was not without reflection upon their potential adverse impacts. The interview data were supplemented by extensive document analysis, including EU policy papers, Tunisian government statements, civil society reports, and media coverage.

My positionality as a white European researcher studying racialized violence in North Africa required constant reflexivity—understood here not as a confessional practice but as attention to how power relations shape knowledge production (Sultana Reference Sultana2015). There have been moments when the privilege afforded to me as white European researcher has been clear such as when traveling through Tunisia with relative ease or to Europe and North America for conferences. Both of which are more difficult for researchers from the Global South (Minai Reference Minai2021) including Tunisia. As a critical IR scholar, my research must be sensitive to questions of knowledge extraction while situating important localized trends in broader global dynamics of dispossession and coercion illuminating the significant experiences of dispossessed, excluded, and often racialized communities. Indeed, my methodological approach draws on what Gurminder Bhambra calls “connected sociologies” (2014)—analytical frameworks that trace the global entanglements of seemingly discrete phenomena rather than comparing artificially separated cases. In doing so, this research aims to avoid many problematic pitfalls. Yet I remain aware of the limitations of decolonial research conducted from Northern institutions and the ongoing challenges of truly dismantling colonial knowledge structures.

Precarious existences in Tunisia’s border regime

We cannot understand contemporary racialized hierarchies within Tunisian society that serve to legitimate racialized bordering practices without an understanding of the long history of anti-Black racism in Tunisia (Scaglioni Reference Scaglioni2020). After the abolition of slavery, economic exploitation and social discrimination were everyday experiences for Black people in Tunisia. Freed slaves found themselves in situations of destitution, and this led some to turn to petty crime and prostitution to survive (Scaglioni Reference Scaglioni2020). Consequently, blackness became “structurally linked to poverty and to other stereotypes such as sexual excess and vulgarity, inclination to crime” (Scaglioni Reference Scaglioni2020, 123). The persistence of anti-Black racism is typified in the everyday use of “abid” meaning slave, to refer to Black people which still exists in some popular discourse (Scaglioni Reference Scaglioni2020). The revolution served as an opportunity for activists—with the right to seek asylum being enshrined into Tunisian law and racial discrimination criminalized since 2011 (Mzioudet Reference Mzioudet, Robins and Greadie2022; Vernon Reference Vernon2020). However, in Tunisia, as so often, there is a discrepancy between that which is provided by legal frameworks and the reality faced by migrants and refugees (El-Ghali Reference El-Ghali2022). The racialized hierarchies that permeate Tunisian society shape attitudes and ultimately policy (Jung Reference Jung2023) toward migration with Black African migrants racialized and “otherized” in contrast to European “ex-pats” or Libyans, who are often colloquially referred to as “brothers” or “guests”Footnote ³ .

However, the racialized distinctions made between migrants in Tunisia are beyond linguistics. Black people in Tunisia face the violent consequences of state apparatuses, be they security forces, bureaucratic and administrative bodies, or legal frameworks, which disproportionately punish racialized migrant populations. This has worsened since Saied’s Great Replacement rhetoric and the subsequent uptick in acts of racist vigilante and state violence. Yet, Saied’s racism represents intensification rather than innovation—illuminating the intersection of economic crisis and political authoritarianism that intensifies racist scapegoating. The populist instrumentalization of preexisting racist attitudes has been increasingly integrated into state strategies to manage the socioeconomic fallouts of failed neoliberalism. Racialized migrants serve as an easy scapegoat for lack of job opportunities, social problems, and crime in poor neighborhoods (El-Ghali Reference El-Ghali2022) in a country that has a history of racism toward Black Africans and Black Tunisians (Scaglioni Reference Scaglioni2020). We can see evidence of this in political discourse. For example, in June 2022, the governor of Sfax stated that Black African migrants should be buried in a separate cemetery from Tunisians unless they are MuslimFootnote ⁴ . The government’s focus on Black African migrants in Tunisia obscures Tunisia’s much bigger migration issue—“the thousands of Tunisians seeking to leave Tunisia and travel to Europe by any means possible”Footnote ⁵ . In the European context, moral panic surrounding North African migration has been whipped up to distract from economic stagnation and declining standards of living (Danewid Reference Danewid2022). Similarly, I argue Tunisian political elites whip up moral panic surrounding Black African migration to distract from political and economic crises in Tunisia. This moves from methodological nationalism revealing connections between declining living standards, populist legitimation, racist rhetoric, and intensified border regimes globally (Ward and De Costa Vieira Reference Ward and De Costa Vieira2024).

The political economy of non-hosting

Racialized distinctions structure Tunisia’s economy. Labor law includes “national preference”—opening paths for business, expats and Europeans while all but excluding migrant workers from other African nations (Vernon Reference Vernon2020, 4). This suspends racialized migrant populations in a position of irregularity making contracted employment virtually impossible pushing many to informal work and overstaying VISAs. This leaves populations “extremely vulnerable to exploitation by employers, and irregular status makes it particularly difficult for recourse to law and enforcing rights” (Vernon Reference Vernon2020, 8).

The structural position of Black African migrants in Tunisia exemplifies what Marx termed the “industrial reserve army”—a surplus population whose presence disciplines the broader workforce (Marx Reference Marx1867). Black migrants constitute not simply reserve labor but racialized reserve labor (Genova Reference Genova2023), subject to super-exploitation justified by their constructed otherness. This racialization creates what Fanon called “zones of non-being” (Fanon Reference Fanon2008) where normal rules of human treatment do not apply enabling forms of violence and exclusion that would provoke outcry if directed at Tunisian citizens. Manufactured irregularity serves specific functions within Tunisia’s political economy. For employers, it provides ultra-cheap labor that reduces costs in construction, agriculture, and domestic service (Mullin Reference Mullin2025). In Sfax, where racialized labor is at the heart of many industries, there are widespread cases of severe exploitation and even modern slavery (FreedomUnited 2022). The head of an association which works with Ivoirian migrants in Tunisia described working conditions as “like a prison” (FreedomUnited 2022).

The construction of zones of ‘nonbeing’ acts not just exclude migrant populations from the formal labor market, but also from vital social services. Studies have shown accessing healthcare, and housing is an issue for racialized migrants living in Tunisia (El-Ghali Reference El-Ghali2022; Gross-Wyrtzen Reference Gross-Wyrtzen2023; Scaglioni Reference Scaglioni2020). This is particularly an issue for Black women who face sexual exploitation and lack of access to reproductive healthcareFootnote ⁶ (Araissia Reference Araissia2019). Thus, Tunisia’s border regime deploys both active violence and calculated abandonment against Black migrants (El-Ghali Reference El-Ghali2022) creating what Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2019) theorizes as “necropolitical” governance—the power to determine who may live and who must die. This violence is not exceptional but constitutive of the racial order that positions Black bodies as threats requiring management, containment, or elimination.

The decision to maintain racialized migrant populations in precarious existences is political. Tunisia is in a period of economic stagnation, high unemployment and declining standards of living. This climate means that it would be “incredibly politically unpopular” for the government to introduce formal paths to regulation for undocumented migrant workersFootnote ⁷ . Even labor unions have reproduced the narrative of migrants as undercutting Tunisian wages or taking Tunisian jobsFootnote ⁸ . This contradiction—simultaneous dependence and exclusion—characterizes racial capitalism’s operation both in Tunisia and beyond (Mullin Reference Mullin2025). The state satisfies capital’s need for cheap labor while appeasing citizen anxieties through performative exclusion (Bird and Schmid Reference Bird and Schmid2023).

Racialized policing

Police violence against Black migrants follows predictable patterns that reveal the racial logic of Tunisia’s security apparatus. Racialized migrant populations face violent and heavy-handed policing and are often not taken seriously when they are the victim of crimeFootnote ⁹ and thus, racialized hierarchies impose themselves in the sense of who is deemed to deserve protection and who is not—once again being relegated to a zone of non-being. In urban areas, there is an intersection with the violence faced by communities in marginalized neighborhoods more broadly (El-Ghali Reference El-Ghali2022), or in other words, the other “edge populations” of racial capitalism (see Bhattacharyya Reference Bhattacharyya2018). In such spaces, security forces conduct regular identity checks that exclusively target Black people at transport hubs, in commercial districts, and spaces where migrants congregate (Mullin Reference Mullin2025). This typifies the state’s use of violence to control the mobility of racialized people—an integral mechanism through which surplus populations are controlled (see Axster Reference Axster2023). These encounters involve humiliation, physical violence, and extortion– and reportedly for women—sexual violence (Dumont Reference Dumont2025). The economics of police predation create incentives for continued irregularity with reports of officers demand bribes from informal workers to avoid arrest (Kimball Reference Kimball2024). Those unable to pay face detention in conditions that violate basic human dignity. There is also clear evidence of racialized policing in Tunisia’s borderlands where “the state and the police often circumvent the right to apply for asylum through a range of policing strategies” (El-Ghali Reference El-Ghali2022, 149). NGOs and scholars have documented “refugee” push backs or security services abandoning people in the middle of nowhere in the nightFootnote ¹⁰ .

Once again, racialized policing of Tunisia’s migrant populations has recently intensified in the wake of Kais Saied’s racist speech in February 2023. Tunisian border agencies have been accused of rounding up Black migrants and leaving them in the desert (Tondo Reference Tondo2023) as well as leaving African migrants attempting to travel to Europe in unseaworthy vessels adrift at sea instead of helping them. Things became so dangerous for Black people in Tunisia that Black Tunisians are only leaving the house with the official documents and certain African states are repatriating their citizens for their own protection (Xu and El Damanhoury Reference Xu and El Damanhoury2023). Many African migrants, having been evicted from their homes, often sleeping rough outside their embassies or UN agency offices, facing harassment and violence in the streets, chose to try and make the dangerous sea crossing. In May 2023 reports came in from cemeteries and morgues around Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast that they were at full capacity because of the drastic increase in the number of dead, often unidentified, migrants washing up on their beaches (Cordall Reference Cordall2023b). Therefore, Tunisia’s border regime does not offer refugees and asylum seekers protection, regardless of the legal frameworks supposedly in place rather for racialized groups in Tunisia, repression and discrimination is endemic. Thus, anti-Black racism underpins Tunisia’s border regime but this racial violence, as I show below, has been reinforced by EU policies.

Racialized bordering practices as a European export

Contemporary racialized bordering practices have their roots in colonial governance strategies that used racialization to control mobility, labor, and repress dissent (Quijano and Ennis Reference Quijano and Ennis2000). Binary, and often racialized, distinctions between “citizen” and “non-citizen” were at the heart of colonial governance. Memmi argues French colonialism in Tunisia rested upon a form of constructed racial difference that structured every aspect of Tunisian social life including mobility, access to the labor market, and social services in both colony and metropole (Memmi Reference Memmi1957). The Code de l’Indigénat, for example, established separate legal regimes for Europeans and “natives” (see also Spire Reference Spire, Laschi, Deplano and Pes2020).

These racialized distinctions were the basis upon which migration policies, which emerged in the 19th century to control mobility and exploit racialized labor between colony and metropole were later built. Simultaneously, racialization within the colonies acted to control of the mobility colonial subjects—and thus labor control formed the cornerstone of colonial exploitation. Migration control was never about preventing the mobility of racialized groups entirely but limiting, controlling and exploiting it. In Tunisia, the Protectorate system, which created a dual, albeit unequal, sovereignty between France and the Tunisian Bey (Lewis Reference Lewis2013) developed sophisticated mechanisms for racial control: the contrôle civil monitored Tunisian movements, the Service des Affaires Indigènes managed “native” populations, and the gendarmerie enforced spatial segregation (Thomas Reference Thomas2012). Furthermore, colonial security forces were stationed near important sites of resource extraction, such as Tunisia’s valuable phosphate industry, to ensure unfettered extraction (Challand Reference Challand2020; Thomas Reference Thomas2012) and the pre-emption or quick suppression of workers uprisings.

Racialized migration policies persisted in the context of decolonization as European colonial powers decimated by war sought to attract cheap racialized labor (Gutiérrez Rodríguez Reference Gutiérrez Rodríguez2018) from their (former) colonies while preventing the unrestricted movement of colonial subjects. Germany, for example, recruited “guest workers” from North Africa throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, migrant workers were never intended to be anything more than mere guest workers were expected to return “home” once they had fulfilled their economic purpose. Many Tunisians traveled to France to join the migrant workforce fueling growth in the metropole. However, North African migrants in France, despite their economic contribution and “French” socialization, education, and often legal status, were racialized as Arab—discursively constructed as a cultural threat to French values, white women and racial hegemony (Blanchard Reference Blanchard2016). Thus, racialization served to control mobility of the citizens of newly independent colonial states (El-Enany Reference El-Enany2019) justifying precarious and exploitative labor conditions. Providing a thorough account of the development of migration policies is not the purpose of this paper; however, through the brief discussion above, the colonial genealogy of racialized migration control becomes clear. This helps us understand the use of EU policy, in the post-colonial period, to do the very same things—create differentiated mobility control strategies justified through constructed racialized hierarchies and operationalize these mobility regimes to channel super-exploitable racialized labor as necessary.

The development of European migration policy is marked by the very same racist and colonial roots (Pace and Roccu Reference Pace and Roccu2020). The “removal” of borders within the continent and the principles of free movement around it, acted to change not abolish the categories of “outsiders” and “insiders” from national ones to European level ones through the creation of European citizenship and the Schengen VISA for example. With the walls now raised, the rules of access to Fortress Europe became increasingly overtly racialized—perhaps best typified by the very aptly named, blacklist and whitelist countries for Schengen VISAs (Cholewinski Reference Cholewinski2016). Indeed, the European communities would go on to play a fundamental role in the construction of the modern racialized border regime—something it would seek to export globally through its relations with “partner” states.

EU externalization, for example, perpetuates these colonial patterns by controlling access to the “core” through new mechanisms. The system permits entry for highly qualified professionals from the Global South—fueling Tunisia’s “brain drain” (Labidi Reference Labidi2020)—while forcing others into dangerous irregular routes. Those who survive often join Europe’s informal labor markets as undocumented, precarious, and exploitable workers (EUFRA 2019). This differentiated inclusion serves racial capitalism by creating hierarchies of exploitability that ensure capital access to appropriate labor for different functions (Jung Reference Jung2023). Contemporary EU policies and practices also perpetuate these neocolonial patterns by enlisting Tunisian political elites into their racialized border regime. European communities (and later the EU), often sought to integrate economic assistance, framed in the neoliberal paradigm, and migration control into agreements with its Mediterranean neighbors—thus incentivizing North African state’s cooperation migration control objectives. For example, in 1995, Tunisia signed an agreement with the EU to reduce Tunisian migration to Europe through “regional development” and commitments to “reintegrate” Tunisians who had arrived in Europe “irregularly” back into “their country of origin” (Jbili and Enders Reference Jbili and Enders1996, 19).

While the EU has long used its relationship with its neighbors to further its internal security objectives in terms of migration control, the racialized violence in the European border regime has intensified in the post 2008 financial crisis and post 2015 migrant crisis context. As European populations previously benefitting from imperial capitalism have started to experience declining living standards, wages, and collapsing social services there has been a move to identify a scape goat—racialized migrants (Danewid Reference Danewid2022)—as opposed to building solidarities. This is seen in the rollout of its increasingly violent border regime to prevent the entry of racialized individuals travelling from Africa and the Middle East. For example, FRONTEX, transformed into a fully-fledged border control agency in 2016 (Léonard and Kaunert Reference Léonard and Kaunert2022) has been complicit in refugee “pushbacks” (Waters et al. Reference Waters, Freudenthal and Williams2020). Furthermore, development aid conditional on migration control and readmission agreements tied to trade preferences have become the contemporary means by which European policymakers ensure North African political elites’ compliance with their migration control efforts (Cassarino Reference Cassarino2025).

Tunisian political elites are not devoid of agency. As the EU looked to “secure” its expanded neighborhood in the post-Cold War context, Tunisia’s elite was keen to leverage EU concerns regarding so-called illegal migration for economic opportunitiesFootnote ¹¹ . While wanting to avoid the EU “meddling” in domestic security affairs, Tunisian political elites did cooperate on migration - promising to prevent people travelling from Tunisia to the EU illegally in return for EU financial assistance. Thus, the Ben Ali regime’s desire to control migration at a given time was primarily transactional (Lixi Reference Lixi2018) something that has persisted in the post-transition period. For example, while Tunisian officials reneged on their previous “red line” (M Limam Reference Limam2020) by agreeing to a readmission agreement as part of the July 2023 MoU, safe third country status and disembarkation platforms remain nonstartersFootnote ¹² . The consequence of this impasse is a so-called policy of “non-hosting” (Bisiaux et al. Reference Bisiaux, Ben Amor, Charles, Espuche and Heller2020) whereby Tunisian forces prevent international migrants in Tunisia from carrying on their journey towards Europe to appease the EU, but current Tunisian VISA policy and asylum system (or lack thereof) prevents pathways regularization thus maintaining migrants at the margins of Tunisian society (Bisiaux et al. Reference Bisiaux, Ben Amor, Charles, Espuche and Heller2020; El-Ghali Reference El-Ghali2022). Significantly, preferential trade agreements between the EU and Tunisia mean that European investors and businesses still profit from cheap labor in low value industries in Tunisia (EUFRA 2019). This includes the “irregular labor” of Black African migrants in Tunisia, as well as low wage Tunisian labor. For example, the Tunisian olive oil is harvested by poorly paid, precariously employed seasonal workers and sold at very low rates to Italian suppliers due to preferential EU–Tunisia trade agreements that protect European suppliers. Once in Italy, it is mixed, bottled, and branded with a “made in Italy” sticker and sold at much higher value. Thus, Europe benefits from an easily exploitable racialized labor both “here” and “there” created and sustained through EU–Tunisia relations. In this sense, we can understand EU externalization and its increasingly violent border regime through the lens of racial capitalism.

Kais Saied, who has been publicly criticized by top EU figures (MiddleEastMonitor 2022) for his authoritarian power grabs, views cooperation with the EU on migration as an opportunity to improve his hand when negotiating with the EU. In fact, despite Saied’s racist discourses causing a spike in the numbers of Black people trying to leave Tunisia and travel to Europe, it has also presented him with unexpected opportunities to leverage European leaders, obsessed with reducing migration, to illicit further economic and security cooperation and assistance. As part of the 2023 MoU, Tunisia will receive 105 million euros to “combat anti-smuggling operations, reinforce border management and speed up the return of asylum seekers whose applications are denied” (European Commission 2023) as well as 150million euros of budgetary support in return of macro-stabilization measures. In return, Tunisian policymakers committed to preventing migrants from leaving Tunisia as well as agreeing to migrant readmissions. Consequently, the number of individuals returned to Tunisia has gone up drastically and the number of Tunisians attempting the journey to the EU illegally has fallen (AfricaNews 2023). Thus, Tunisian political elites have been enlisted into the EU’s racialized border project. However, many have warned us against assigning too much agency to a single actor in the face of centuries of racist and colonial capitalist accumulation which has contributed to Tunisia’s peripheral position in the global economy. Indeed, they emphasize the relatively small margin of maneuver Tunisian policymakers have in their negotiations with external partners (Mullin Reference Mullin2025; Rouabah and Mullin Reference Rouabah and Mullin2018). Furthermore, scholars have long underscored the role of Global Southern political elites in the subordination of their own people (Rodney Reference Rodney1972)—often highlighting the personal benefits that the rulers of these societies receive from their complicity with the demands of Western imperialist powers.

Economic dependency and neoliberalization

Tunisia’s cooperation with the European communities can be traced back to the 1970s, when Tunisia first signed an accord covering areas including migration and trade. At this time, European elites sought to create formal agreements to reassert their dominance and sustain economic dependency in the context of decolonization (Hamouchene and Riahi Reference Hamouchene and Riahi2020; Langan and Price Reference Langan and Price2020) while controlling levels of immigration to Europe for political purposes. The debt crisis of the 1980s offered Global Northern political elites further opportunities to maintain dependency and “open up” markets across the Global South. In 1986, Tunisia entered into a Structural Adjustment Package agreement with the IMF designed to “open up” the economy, increase competitivity, and reduce government spending (Bogaert Reference Bogaert2013; Hanieh Reference Hanieh2015). However, liberalization exposed Tunisia’s vulnerabilities to external market forces and deepened its dependency on exports of low-value goods to Europe. Significantly, the IMF was not the only external actor seeking to open up the Tunisian economy. Indeed, the aforementioned 1995 accord between Tunisia and the EU provided for extensive trade “liberalization” forming part of Ben Ali’s broader policy of deregulation pursued by the from the late 1980s onward (Aliriza Reference Aliriza and Radwan2020). However, in practice, this “undermine(d) various Tunisian high-value industries and eroded Tunisia’s food and energy sovereignty in the long term”Footnote ¹³ —reinforcing Tunisia’s racialized and peripheral position in the global economy (Aliriza Reference Aliriza and Radwan2020; Mullin Reference Mullin2023).

Despite recognition that neoliberal reforms pursued from 1986 onward had eroded the standards of living of many Tunisians and contributed to the fall of Ben Ali in January 2011 (Bogaert Reference Bogaert2013), the claim from many external actors was that neoliberalism itself was not the problem. Rather, it was suggested that it was Ben Ali’s corrupt and oligarchic implementation of neoliberal policies which was the issue (Rijkers et al. Reference Rijkers, Freund and Nucifora2014). Thus, the medicine prescribed for the “ills” of neoliberalization was “more and better neoliberalization”Footnote ¹⁴ rather than radical and progressive overhaul of Tunisia’s deeply European-dependent economy and its “perpetual peripheral” position within the global economic order (see Aliriza Reference Aliriza and Radwan2020). Accordingly, since the revolution of January 2011, the role and influence of external actors, such as the EU, in shaping domestic politics in Tunisia has only continued to increase (Maryon Reference Maryon2023a).

Indeed, post-revolutionary financial assistance packages provided by the international community, such as the EU’s Macro-Financial Assistance (MFA) program to Tunisia worth over 1B EUR by June 2019, came with “conditionality in all but name”Footnote ¹⁵ . According to the European Commission, the disbursement of each “tranche” of the EU financial assistance to Tunisia is conditional upon the implementation of the IMF’s reform agenda. Significantly, the EU conditioned disbursements of finance on Tunisia meeting the recommended reforms agenda outlined by external actors (Chandoul Reference Chandoul2015). This effectively imposed austerity and neoliberal reforms, making alternative economic models virtually impossible (Hecan Reference Hecan2016). This not only betrayed the demands of the revolution in terms of calls for socioeconomic justice (Bogaert Reference Bogaert2013) but also further compounded socioeconomic grievances in Tunisia (Ben Gahda Reference Ben Gahda2022). Consequently, standards of living, unemployment, inflation, poverty rates, and inequality are worse today (July 2025) than they were in January 2011 (see Ben Gahda Reference Ben Gahda2022). Not only were people struggling, but they also felt that democracy and politicians had “failed to deliver on their economic promises”Footnote ¹⁶ . At the time same, consecutive loan programs with actors such as the EU has left Tunisia in a sovereign debt crisis (ArabWeekly 2020) whereby it must enter into assistance programs with actors such as the EU to service the debt on its existing debts undermining its ability to properly negotiate such packagesFootnote ¹⁷ . Scholars of racial capitalism have emphasized the role of sovereign debt in maintaining a country’s dependent and racialized position within the global economy (Mullin Reference Mullin2023, 183).

It is in this context of economic stagnation, socioeconomic injustice, and the declining legitimacy of the democratic project in Tunisia that we must understand the emergence of populist, racist, anti migrant political discourse. By February 2023, Saied was becoming increasingly politically isolated with even his most staunch supporters starting to question his priorities because of his obsession with fighting political opponents, while most Tunisians suffered food and petrol shortages and crippling rates of inflation (Tunis Afrique Press 2023). By targeting Black African migrants, portraying them as simultaneously unemployed criminals, a drain on the stretched resources of the state, and stealing Tunisian jobs, Saied not only identified a scapegoat for people’s economic woes, as per populists globally, but also one that plays into historic racist attitudes and stereotypes in Tunisia (Scaglioni Reference Scaglioni2020; Parikh Reference Parikh2023). Furthermore, his Great Replacement rhetoric—linked to conspiracy theories that had been circulating online—echoed the online content that his dwindling support base, comprised of young, often economically marginalized men as well as more traditional social conservatives, was being bombarded with through twitterbots and echo-chamber algorithms (E. C. Brown Reference Brown2023). Of course, this targeting of migrant groups plays into his support base’s political and economic discontent, whipping up moral panic and support for his repressive measures, but does nothing to ease the economic hardships Tunisians are facing.

Thus, we can see that EU–Tunisia relations have served to maintain Tunisia’s peripheral position within the global colonial economy and that Europe’s imposed structural adjustments since 2011 have intensified to the socioeconomic turmoil in which populist racist discourse thrives. However, one of the recent developments of the European border regime has been the development of integrated assistance programs—bringing together conditional development aid, trade policy, the provision of security aid training and equipment, something I explore below, and cooperation on migration control—in a single agreement (see Cassarino Reference Cassarino2025). These integrated assistance packages allow EU policymakers to pursue their objectives; neoliberalizing North African economies to foster further dependence on European markets, the pursuit European security objectives and exporting responsibility for migration control to Mediterranean states, simultaneously. For Tunisian policymakers, they allow them to deflect criticism for more authoritarian governance strategies, acquire security assistance to reinforce their coercive state power, and utilize European moral panic surrounding migration to garner much needed financial assistance in the context of prolonged economic stagnation and spiraling debt.

Security Assistance as Racial Infrastructure

In this section, I demonstrate how European security assistance and cooperation with Tunisia constitutes the deliberate construction of “racial infrastructure” (Rana Reference Rana2016) that enables the systematic exploitation and disposal of Black bodies. Rather than mere technical cooperation, this assistance serves dual objectives: fortifying Tunisia’s capacity for racialized violence against Black migrants while limiting and controlling mobility toward Europe. Since 2011, European states have dramatically expanded security assistance to Tunisia, with funding increasing from $20.8 million in 2010 to $141 million by 2017 (securityassistance.org nd), creating material infrastructure that sorts bodies according to racialized hierarchies.

The material dimensions of EU assistance reveal its racial logic. The July 2023 MoU committed to providing Tunisia with “boats, jeeps, radars, drones and other types of patrolling equipment” alongside 105 million euros for “anti-smuggling operations” (European Commission 2023). These technologies do not simply enforce borders—they create what Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2019) calls “infrastructures of circulation” that differentiate between bodies based on race. The same surveillance systems that expedite movement for European businesspeople and tourists become mechanisms of immobilization for Black migrants, transforming them into what Bhattacharyya terms “edge populations” (p18) available for exploitation or abandonment. The biometric systems funded by EU programs deserve particular attention (see Kaunert et al. Reference Kaunert, Leonard, Wertman, Cusumano and Hofmaier2020). These technologies create permanent digital markers of “irregularity” that follow Black migrants across borders, ensuring their continued exploitability (Meyer and Berthélémy Reference Meyer and Berthélémy2024). Once registered in EU-funded databases as “irregular,” individuals cannot escape this categorization, remaining perpetually vulnerable to detention, extortion, and deportation. This technological infrastructure thus serves racial capitalism by maintaining pools of permanently precarious labor.

European training programs exemplify how racial capitalism operates through security cooperation. The “cross homogenization” approach, whereby European forces train Tunisian military and police together (Maryon Reference Maryon2023b), militarizes migration control while embedding racialized threat perceptions. As documented by De Bruin and Karabatak (Reference De Bruin and Karabatak2021, 96), such training increases security forces’ propensity to view civilians—particularly racialized civilians—as threats requiring violent management. German and American funding for the 125-mile fence along the Tunisia–Libya border (Cimini and Santini Reference Cimini and Hanau Santini2021) exemplifies this logic: marketed as counter-terrorism infrastructure, it primarily disrupts border communities’ livelihoods while channeling Black migrants into increasingly dangerous routes where they become more vulnerable to exploitation.

The political economy of security assistance reveals how racial capitalism creates self-perpetuating systems. European security contractors profit from equipment sales and training contracts, while Tunisian security officials benefit from both formal budgets and informal extraction through documented bribes. This creates a “racial security complex” with vested interests in maintaining the current system (see Mullin Reference Mullin2023). The 150 million euros in budgetary support attached to the 2023 MoU explicitly links Tunisia’s economic stability to its performance in racialized migration control (European Commission 2023), ensuring that economic desperation drives continued cooperation. Crucially, EU security assistance strengthens the Tunisian state’s capacity to produce and manage pools of racialized labor. The equipment and training enable Tunisian forces to conduct raids, identity checks, and desert abandonments that redirect rather than stop migration, creating conditions where Black migrants must accept any employment terms to avoid detection. The timing of expanded security assistance following Saied’s February 2023 racist speech reveals how EU support emboldens state violence. Despite international condemnation, the EU not only maintained but also increased security cooperation, signaling that racialized violence would be rewarded rather than sanctioned thus exposing the fundamental alignment between EU externalization and Tunisia’s racialized border regime.

Security assistance also functions to suppress resistance to racial capitalism. The same capabilities used to police migrants enhance state capacity to monitor and repress Tunisian civil society organizations opposing racism (Mzioudet Reference Mzioudet, Robins and Greadie2022), labor unions organizing migrant workers, or journalists documenting abuse. The integrated nature of security cooperation—combining migration control with “counterterrorism” and “stability” objectives—provides cover for targeting any perceived threat to the racial order (Maryon Reference Maryon2023b). This infrastructure ultimately serves capital interests on both shores of the Mediterranean. By maintaining Black migrants in perpetual precarity, it ensures continued access to super-exploitable labor for European agricultural and Tunisian construction sectors (Bird and Schmid Reference Bird and Schmid2023; Mullin Reference Mullin2025). By creating suffering spectacular enough to deter some migration while allowing enough through to meet labor needs, it performs racial capitalism’s essential function: creating differentiated categories of exploitability that enable accumulation while preventing solidarity (Bhattacharyya Reference Bhattacharyya2018; Kundnani Reference Kundnani2021). The EU’s security assistance to Tunisia thus reveals externalization not as a mere policy choice but as a structural requirement of contemporary racial capitalism—the deliberate construction of racial infrastructure that sorts, exploits, and disposes of racialized bodies in service of capital accumulation.