Introduction, Framing, and Method
This article challenges the racial aphasia of mainstream migration scholarship. It argues that clear racial and colonial continuities underpin the European Union’s (EU) border management, evident in the ways it criminalizes migration. Its central contention is that the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum (European Commission [EC] 2024) does not inaugurate a fresh start—as EU discourse repeatedly claims—but continues Europe’s long history of constructing and excluding racialized subjectivities. Focusing on two components of the Pact—the Crisis Regulation and the International Partnerships Pillar—the article shows how the trope of crisis, embodied in emergency law, and the externalization of border control to the Global South reactivate longstanding colonial practices. Through a method of rehistoricization, it situates these contemporary tools of migration governance within the colonial matrix in which they originated. Crisis and emergency law, integral to colonial rule, reappear here to justify derogations from international legal obligations; the asymmetries structuring international partnerships reproduce Europe’s historical use of the Global South as a buffer zone for containing racialized mobility. This explicit mobilization of rehistoricization as a method forms the article’s core scholarly contribution, advancing racial aphasia as an analytical lens through which EU migration governance can be understood within longer colonial histories and providing a framework for future empirically grounded analyses of how these continuities operate in institutional practice.
Rehistoricizing current border practices within the broader coloniality of power is largely absent from academic and political migration analyses. Much scholarship proceeds in a historical vacuum marked by linear explanations, and, importantly, migration governance presents itself in a pervasive presentism where it is continually responding to unprecedented situations, each framed as a departure from what came before. This temporal flattening obscures the longer histories of power and racial hierarchy embedded in contemporary institutions. By embedding the Pact within those histories, the article offers a framework that treats racialization as a historically contingent and continuously reactivated process, rather than a feature of a supposedly new or exceptional present. In doing so, it restores the temporal depth erased in policy discourse and foregrounds the colonial logics that shape EU migration governance today.
Mainstream migration scholarship tends to narrate European migration control as beginning in the 1960s, when economic decline and the end of labor recruitment supposedly transformed migration into a social and political problem (Castles Reference Castles and Stone2012; Hansen Reference Hansen2003; Huysmans Reference Huysmans and Cederman2001). Restrictive laws and “very inelegant and frankly racially discriminatory measures” (Guild Reference Guild2004, 4) are framed as postwar developments, culminating in early European Community (EC) coordination on migration and family reunification. Other authors situate the politicization of migration in the 1990s, with the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) institutionalizing migration control at the EU level (Guild 2004; Castles Reference Castles and Stone2012). Securitization scholarship identifies the same decade as the moment when immigration from outside Europe became a securitized threat (Wæver Reference Wæver1996), enabling the use of extraordinary measures while reinforcing the figure of the border crosser as “unwelcome and dangerous” (Fotou Reference Fotou, Machin and Meidert2021).
Despite different chronologies, these accounts share the assumption that restrictive migration control and migrant dehumanization are essentially late-twentieth-century developments. Policy and media narratives replicate this structure. They rely on terms like “flows,” “stocks,” and “patterns” that obscure historical depth, and frame each geopolitical shift as a new crisis requiring new tools—whether described as “stepping up cooperation,” being “more effective,” or replacing an “old system [that] no longer works” (EC 2020). What is largely absent is a sustained engagement with race, racialization, and coloniality. These concepts remain in the background (Moffette and Walters Reference Moffette and Walters2018), even though the practices at issue—profiling, detention, camps, hierarchies of deservingness, and conditional migration agreements with the Global South—are steeped in colonial genealogies. As Mayblin and Turner (Reference Mayblin and Turner2021), drawing on Spivak (Reference Spivak1999), argue, this “sanctioned ignorance” rests on the assumption that “the present is always new” (Hansen Reference Hansen2003). Racial aphasia, or what Anievas et al. (Reference Anievas, Nivi and Robbie2014) call racial “avoidance,” characterizes mainstream migration scholarship. Following Thompson (Reference Thompson, Anievas, Manchanda and Routledge2014), I understand racial aphasia as a “calculated forgetting” of how the colonial past continues to shape the present. It is not inadvertent ignorance but a structured dissociation, echoing Stoler’s account of colonial aphasia as an occlusion of knowledge (Stoler Reference Stoler2011).
This article aligns with emerging critical migration scholarship that refuses such amnesia and traces how colonial mentalities and Eurocentric stereotypes inform EU border security and the regulation of inclusion and exclusion (e.g. Gutiérrez Georgi Reference Georgi and Vishwas2019; Lemberg-Pedersen et al. Reference Lemberg-Pedersen, Fett, Mayblin, Sahraoui and Stambøl2022; Mau Reference Mau, Gülzau, Laube and Zaun2015; Mayblin Reference Mayblin2017; Mayblin and Turner Reference Mayblin and Turner2021; Rodríguez Reference Gérrez2018; Tudor Reference Tudor2018; van Houtum Reference van2010). What this article adds is the insistence that rehistoricization be operationalized—not simply invoked—as an analytical method capable of revealing how the practices presented as new in the Pact are reformulations of older colonial logics.
Analytically, the article draws on racialization and the coloniality of migration. Racialization, understood as “the production of racial subjects” (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2002, 58) beyond biological descriptors, is an ongoing process that structures inequalities even in societies proclaiming themselves post-racial (Lentin Reference Lentin2020). It defines who is deemed deserving and grievable (Butler Reference Butler2010; Weheliye Reference Weheliye2014) and remains rooted in colonialism and imperialism. Methodologically, the article employs a materialist rehistoricization approach (Lemberg-Pedersen Reference Lemberg-Pedersen2019), which identifies how colonial elements and practices recur in contemporary institutions, infrastructures, and markets. This approach avoids interpreting current border practices in terms of urgency or emergency and instead understands them as part of longer political and economic trajectories.
The supranational character of the EU makes such a method particularly necessary. EU governance is marked by diffuse accountability, security practices enacted through administrative routines, and technocratic or humanitarian language that obscures racialized effects. Rehistoricization re-embeds EU institutions within the longue durée of coloniality, revealing how bureaucratic complexity serves to reproduce, rather than transcend, colonial logics of differentiation. Applied to a comprehensive policy framework such as the Pact, it illuminates how supposedly neutral tools reactivate modes of control shaped in and through colonial governance. This methodological contribution—a historically grounded, decolonial reinterpretation of policy architectures—is one of the article’s key interventions in migration scholarship.
The article heeds Mayblin and Turner’s Migration Studies and Colonialism (2021) call, which urges scholars to consider how colonialism shaped who could move, under what conditions, and how these structures continue to shape migration today; to resist treating new immigration laws or securitization technologies as novel; and to attend to the cultural and conceptual legacies of empire that inform ideas of human worth, deservingness, and integration. These insights align closely with the present article’s critique of both racial aphasia and presentism in migration scholarship and policy.
The Pact’s self-presentation as a new and comprehensive system therefore becomes a key site for examining how presentism functions: the very claim of newness obscures the colonial continuities that structure both its emergency framework and its externalization agenda. By rehistoricizing the Crisis Regulation and the International Partnerships Pillar, the article demonstrates that the Pact’s purported innovations—its crisis framework and its externalization agenda—are embedded in colonial genealogies that continue to shape Europe’s governance of mobility.
The article proceeds in three parts. The first engages with critical scholarship on migration and colonialism to outline how colonial expropriation, slavery, hierarchies of humanness and deservingness, and the racial structuring of law shape contemporary migration governance. The second examines the racialized criminalization of migration in the EU and how it is intensified by the Pact, showing how its self-professed newness replicates longstanding colonial patterns. The third rehistoricizes the Crisis Regulation and International Partnerships Pillar to demonstrate how both reproduce colonial techniques of emergency, derogation, and delegated border control.
Migration, Race, and (post) Coloniality
“any discussion of policing [of the border] today that does not ground itself in the historical context of slavery and colonialism is imagining a world that is not, rather than dealing with the world as it is (Saucier and Woods Reference Saucier and Woods2014, 60).”
“Coloniality survives colonialism” (Maldonado-Torres Reference Maldonado-Torres2007) is an often-cited phrase by Puerto Rican sociologist Nelson Maldonado-Torres in his treatment of the concept of “coloniality of being.” Coined by scholars in the field of decolonial theory, initially by philosopher Enrique Dussel, but really developed and popularized by the semiotician and theorist Walter D. Mignolo, the “coloniality of being” concept highlights how colonial power dynamics continue to shape identities, social hierarchies, and ways of knowing, affecting our ways of being in the world and aspects of our modern experience. Following this, the present article understands postcoloniality to mean “the complex and ongoing impacts of colonial encounters and their power matrices for both colonised and colonising societies” (Lemberg-Pedersen et al. Reference Lemberg-Pedersen, Fett, Mayblin, Sahraoui and Stambøl2022).
Starting with the global order, scholarship has shown how the national and global socioeconomic transformations that colonialism established are the root cause of contemporary global inequalities in power and wealth. The centuries of colonial dispossession lie at the heart of these inequalities and their racialized character, while “prevalent constructions of race have shaped visions and practices of international politics, thus helping to sustain and reproduce a deeply unjust stratified global order” (Bell 2013, cited in Anievas et al. Reference Anievas, Nivi and Robbie2014, 3). Perpetuated by neocolonialist policies and institutions, race, racism, and the legacies of colonialism continue to determine and structure social, cultural, and political relations and hierarchies, which lead to “epistemic erasures and strategic silences in normalizing a predominantly white, Euro-American world order” (Parashar and Schulz Reference Parashar and Schulz2021, 867).
The role of slavery and the slave trade, which has mostly been silenced in the analysis of contemporary politics because it is often seen as exorcized by its abolition, cannot be emphasized enough. Not only did it play a great role in the colonial expropriation mentioned above, but it was also crucial in the way humanness and deservingness were early defined. The legacy of slavery was key in the consideration of who counts as human and as equal to the Western, white subject, and therefore to the initial legal iterations of citizenship. By extension, it was also crucial in the civilized mission connected to “the discourses of being progressive, modern and scientific in these formerly colonised societies.” (Parashar and Schulz Reference Parashar and Schulz2021, 869). The endurance of contemporary racism is attributable to the afterlives of slavery, according to Saidiya Hartman (Reference Hartman1997), while critical scholarship locates its legacy at the foundation of policing, criminal justice, and international law (Saucier and Woods Reference Saucier and Woods2014, 71). For instance, the end of slavery saw the immediate establishment of new, unprecedented laws restricting the mobility of former slaves, which soon initiated the regulation and restriction of immigration within the British Empire (Sharma Reference Sharma2017). In the case of the USA, the connection of the Thirteenth Amendment with racialized hyper-carcerality is well documented (Pope Reference Pope2020). Even if such a strong and direct foundational connection between slavery and criminal justice can be disputed,Footnote 1 the long-term exclusion of certain populations from the liberal framework of personhood and its ensuing rights and protection (Taylor Reference Taylor2022) along with the impunity for all violence and crimes perpetrated against them, may be considered constitutive elements of the problems of contemporary policing (Woods Reference Woods2013, 130; Saucier and Woods Reference Saucier and Woods2014), social exclusion and violence. While all this is well established in postcolonial and other literature, one may ask what does this mean specifically for migration and related issues?
Colonialism and migration are inextricably linked. From the forced migrations of slaves and indentured workers of the triangular slave trade to the unfettered movement of white European subjects around European empires and other lands directly impacted, colonial powers, their administrations, and their global outreach engendered the move of millions of people globally (Castles et al. Reference Castles, de Haas and Miller2014). The era that followed decolonization saw the extensive movement across borders, continuing with people from former colonies moving to the colonial “centres” and metropoles, but also large-scale displacement of populations (Mains et al. Reference Mains, Gilmartin, Cullen, Mohammad, Tolia-Kelly, Raghuram and Winders2013). Hence, colonialism sets very early on a hierarchy of who may cross borders and how: freely or forced, invited or turned away, according to bureaucratic statuses (citizenship, empire belonging, etc) and skin color. However, the impact of colonialism is not limited only to the ability or inability to cross borders.
The notions of humanness and deservingness, enmeshed in colonial power dynamics in the way discussed above, are, of course, pertinent to migration. Migration-related conceptual categories (refugee, asylum seeker, economic migrant, voluntary, or forced) and their “categorical fetishism” (Crawley and Skleparis Reference Crawley and Skleparis2018), along with visa regimes, all designed to exclude people of color, are imbued by colonial and racialized ideologies (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Reference Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Magidimisha, Khalema, Chipungu, Chirimambowa and Chimedza2018). The same applies to the contemporary unfolding forced displacements and the “right-wing, conservative and insular nationalisms and racisms – particularly in Western polities” (Parashar and Schulz Reference Parashar and Schulz2021, 867). The connection of economic migration with Global South development, which is underwritten by neocolonialism (Mutua Reference Mutua2000), is another facet of the interconnectedness between migration and coloniality. Looking at the material history of immigration regimes and borders, as Mayblin and Turner prompt us to do, migration management practices that are presented as novel are nothing new but a reactivation of colonial practices. Heavy use of detention and camps, as well as the externalization of European borders to states in the periphery with heavy conditionalities imposed, are only a few examples of current EU policies reminiscent of colonial imperial practices of the French (Stoler Reference Stoler2011), British (Moore Reference Moore2014), and other colonial powers. To paraphrase Du Bois, with nearly every aspect of European migration management “walks its dark colonial shadow” (Du Bois Reference DuBois1925, 423).
Despite these clear connections, the racial and colonial aphasia in narratives around migration stays strong. Reading mainstream academic or political analyses around European borders, no one could imagine that there have ever been empires or that the current unfolding migration/refugee “crises” and the non-citizens at the European doorstep are in any way connected to Europe’s colonial past. Migration studies present migration as a “post-racial” issue studied mainly through an economistic or human rights lens (Lentin Reference Lentin2020). An “active forgetting” of certain continuities in European migration politics, with a tendency to privilege a certain post-World War II perspective that focuses on the progress of human rights and migration-related (refugee or otherwise) law (Lemberg-Pedersen Reference Lemberg-Pedersen2019), prevails. Many scholars see in the development of the refugee and human rights law, in particular, this reproduction of postcolonial forgetting (Chimni Reference Chimni1998; Lemberg-Pedersen Reference Lemberg-Pedersen2019; Mayblin Reference Mayblin2017; Mutua Reference Mutua2000). For Chimni, the Cold War environment and ensuing consensus in the West fostered the perception of international law as depoliticized (Chimni Reference Chimni1998). Hence, migration-related policies are supposed to stand in a political vacuum, not act as “a medium for the creation and perpetuation of a racialized hierarchy of international norms and institutions that sub-ordinate non-Europeans to Europeans” (Mutua Reference Mutua2000, 31). A vast scholarship that cannot be engaged in full here contradicts the supposed color-blindness of the law in a world constructed by colonial expropriation, slavery, and the exclusion of undesired populations.Footnote 2
To encompass all this, Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Reference Gérrez2018) coined the concept of “coloniality of migration.” Drawing on the decolonial theorists that open this section, hers is a critical analytical framework that explores the connection between racialization and the asylum-migration nexus. As if responding to Mayblin and Turner’s third prompt, about opening our research to include cultural practices, discourses, and products, she explores the “media spectacle” around the 2015 refugee “crisis” and finds it to be “an articulation of a contingency of a specific conjuncture of racism in Europe” (Gutiérrez Rodríguez Reference Gérrez2018, 18). Looking at the hierarchical categories of migrants and refugees produced by migration and asylum policies, Gutiérrez Rodríguez identifies a racist imaginary “reminiscent of the orientalist and racialised practices of European colonialism and imperialism” (Reference Gérrez2018, 16). The figure of the migrant becomes a floating signifier, such as Stuart Hall’s “black Caribbean man” in the Thatcherite era (Hall et al. Reference Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts1978). It is a signifier “for all kinds of racial fantasies” and existential fears, a threat to social and cultural cohesion (Gutiérrez Rodríguez Reference Gérrez2018, 17). “The word immigrant is a catch-all category, combining ethnic and class criteria, into which foreigners are dumped indiscriminately, though not all foreigners and not only foreigners” (Balibar in Balibar and Wallerstein Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991, 221; his emphasis). Tudor comes up with the term “migratism” to describe the ascription of migration to Muslims, black, or people of color, even when they are not migrants. This performative migratization overlaps with racialization, thus, and it is a fundamental racist “strategy of the continuous reconstruction of Europeanness as whiteness” (Tudor Reference Tudor2018, 1064). The figure of the racialized migrant is scary: he has arrived to dilute European culture, threaten states’ social cohesion, and undermine their well-established privileges for citizens. Electoral campaigns and wins, as well as scaremongering media reports, are founded on this fear. The logical result is the criminalization of his presence.
In the next section, I am first briefly exploring criminalization of migration (often called crimmigration) in EU’s migration management to argue that crimmigration is a securitizing strategy that is racially and postcolonially driven, and then I turn to the New Pact and its main issues. Before continuing, a disclaimer: I am aware of the “the risk of reproducing Eurocentrism by overstating the power of the Global North” (Eriksson Baaz and Parashar Reference Eriksson and Maria2021, 287). The danger is real: overemphasizing coloniality as the absolute origin of current political practices; presenting Global South as passive; or even discounting the agency of migrants and European white subjects to challenge colonial power matrices. The risk of reifying said practices is always present, but consciously not my intention. The “European view,” if this is really what is presented here, is warranted in the effort to analyze the colonial continuities in the New Pact.
Crimmigration in EU’s Migration Management: The New Pact on Migration and Asylum
European states have long framed immigration as a social problem (“foreigner problem,” “race relations,” “minority issues”) and resisted recognizing themselves as immigration countries, with Germany explicitly denying this status until 1998 (Castles Reference Castles and Stone2012). By the 1990s, migration and asylum became politically contentious, and the Maastricht (1992) and Amsterdam (1997) Treaties institutionalized a shift from socioeconomic approaches to security-centered ones. Migrants, particularly those from the Global South, increasingly became associated with crime and threat, deepening racialized and colonial anxieties (Garner Reference Garner2007).
Crimmigration, the merging of criminal and immigration law, in EU migration governance expanded through militarized borders, detention regimes, surveillance technologies, and punitive enforcement measures. Scholars identify discursive criminalization—portraying migrants as deviant or dangerous “crimmigrant others” (Franko Reference Franko2019)—as central to legitimizing restrictive measures. Practices across the EU include racial profiling, police involvement in migration control, and imprisonment oriented toward expulsion rather than rehabilitation (Kaufman Reference Kaufman2015). These trends produce a two-tier human rights system privileging EU citizens while rendering racialized non-European migrants increasingly vulnerable (Fotou Reference Fotou, Machin and Meidert2021; Provine and Doty Reference Provine and Doty2011).
Research shows that racialization shapes every stage of migration management: policing, biometrics, digital technologies, detention, and deportation disproportionately target Black, Muslim, and other minority populations (Bowling and Westenra Reference Bowling and Westenra2020; Avsec Reference Avsec2023, 5–6). Such discriminatory effects are compounded by institutional reluctance to acknowledge the centrality of race. These longstanding dynamics of crimmigration are intensified in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which expands detention, increases expulsions, and institutionalizes practices that disproportionately target racialized and non-European populations—developments that, as I go on to show, can only be fully understood when rehistoricized within Europe’s longer colonial governance of mobility.
“Migration is complex. The old system no longer works” is how the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen opened her presentation of the Commission’s proposal for the New Pact on Migration and Asylum in late September 2020 (von der Leyen in EC 2020). Presented as bringing balance among “many legitimate interests” and “between responsibility and solidarity among Member States,” the New Pact was supposedly “a fresh start” that “live[s] up to [EU’s] values” and “the challenges of a globalised world” (EC 2020). It has ever since been promoted as one of the biggest overhauls to the EU’s asylum and migration system in years, containing a variety of policy proposals and recommendations that sought to standardize procedures and create “a proper single cohesive migration policy.” Early readings of the pact showed that nothing it contained was really undoing the “old no longer working system” in any significant way or that it would deliver on the purported focus on solidarity and humane migration management (Chadwick and Montalto Monella Reference Chadwick and Monella2020). I am exploring it here as an eloquent illustration of the misleading newness and presentism of migration policymaking and of political and scholarly migration narratives. I start with the Pact’s main problems before proceeding with rehistoricizing two of its key components.
Initial reactions to the New Pact and criticisms from experts, civil society, and the nongovernmental sector came fast, already in the first week of its publication, with Deutsche Welle running a commentary with the title “EU migration pact has already failed’ just three days later (Riegert Reference Riegert2020). One of the main bones of contention was that the Pact allowed for member states with serious anti-immigrant policies and far-right governments stoking xenophobia to get away with it under the “mandatory yet flexible solidarity” provision. This Pact aspect, destined to placate hardline member states such as Poland, Hungary, Austria, etc., proposed that “those who are not ready to contribute to relocation [of migrants from worst-hit EU countries like Greece and Italy] would assume on behalf of the European Union, the obligation to organize and carry out returns” (Schinas in Chadwick and Montalto Monella Reference Chadwick and Monella2020). Hence, states that have repeatedly proven their unwillingness to host asylum seekers and refugees would, under the New Pact’s proposal, undertake the responsibility of the logistics to return (essentially deport) the persons whose asylum applications were rejected, while the frontline states, such as Spain, Italy and Greece, would be assigned even a bigger responsibility in the initial reception. It is quite clear why the policy in question, coined “return sponsorship,” would fail in the hands of eastern and central European states that have been using their anti-immigrant and anti-refugee stance as leverage in EU politics, given that the Commission failed to explain how they would be convinced to hold up their end of the deal. What is worse was the lack of foreseeing the problems of legality and accountability that would arise in a region where illegal pushbacks have become the norm, with journalists talking of EU’s pushback boom (Fallon Reference Fallon2023) and EU member states like Greece being found guilty of systematic pushback practices in court (ECHR 2025). In the case of Hungary, for instance, one of the states where “flexible solidarity” was aimed at, was in 2020 condemned for illegal pushbacks by the European Court of Justice (CJEU 2020). A hundred pages in the Black Book of Pushbacks commissioned by the European Parliament’s Left group were dedicated to Hungary, while Frontex, the European border agency, announced that it would suspend its Hungarian operations when it became clear that the unlawful practices continued despite the ECJ’s findings (Pronczuk and Novak Reference Pronczuk and Novak2021). As the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, Judith Sunderland, tweeted upon the publication of the New Pact, assigning such responsibilities to states is “like asking the school bully to walk a kid home” (Sunderland Reference Sunderland2020).
Other issues that drew immediate criticism involved the plan to expedite screening procedures at the EU external borders to a maximum of five days and the emphasis on forging partnerships with foreign states in order to restrict the outward flow of migrants (Tsourdi Reference Tsourdi2024). In the case of the former, one needs to question the feasibility of speeding up processes that have long been encumbered with great delays in frontline member states, with gaps in quality and poor records in their asylum decision-making and reception facilities, as judicial authorities and the EC themselves have acknowledged (ECRE 2018). For instance, ECRE’s asylum statistics factsheet suggests an “asylum lottery” where a person’s chances of obtaining protection vary depending on the individual office processing their claim, within the same country (ECRE 2022). As expected, critics pointed out that prioritizing speed in procedures under such dire circumstances would inevitably undermine both the rule of law and human rights, increasing systematic inefficiency in frontline states like Greece (Carrera in Chadwick and Montalto Monella Reference Chadwick and Monella2020).
Moria, the notoriously squalid and overcrowded migrant camp on the island of Lesbos that was burned down in September 2020, figured large in the presentation of the New Pact. Von der Leyen made an explicit reference to it as an example of reception centers to be avoided, while the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, attempted to make “no more Morias!” a slogan for the New Pact. However, the new expedited procedures proposed would need to take place directly at the border, resulting surely in the creation of more closed camps and more detention as the first go-to reception practice (Riegert Reference Riegert2020).
The promotion of partnerships in order to curb emigration involved the promotion of cooperation with “third countries” (read states in the Global South) through the use of diplomatic incentives, such as financial rewards or visa allocations, in order to “manage irregular migration, forced displacement and combat migrant smuggling,” strengthening border management, facilitating voluntary returns to third countries and “fostering cooperation on readmission” (EC 2020, 20–22). Critics pointed out that similar cooperation deals have been concluded in the past with the known problems discussed in the literature around the notion of “safe third countries,” where lack of respect for human rights, appalling conditions in detainment, endangering of migrant lives were among the many problems attested (Osso Reference Osso2023).
European colonial history is defined by racial exclusion, control, and criminalization of movement, externalization of borders, and the use of detention and camps. The New Pact on Migration and Asylum is part of this colonial matrix and needs to be rehistoricised as such. As previously explained, I use rehistoricization to move beyond presentist and ahistorical analyses of “new migration” policies by embedding them in the longer European history of colonial governance. Seen through this lens, the crimmigration dynamics intensified by the Pact—its expansion of detention, expedited expulsions, and racialized enforcement—appear not as innovations but as continuations of imperial modalities for regulating unwanted mobility. Rehistoricization, therefore, provides the analytical frame for the next section, where I examine how the Pact’s crisis and externalization provisions reactivate these older colonial techniques.
Rehistoricizing the EU Pact: “Crisis” and Border Externalization
“History is not the past. It is the present.
(James Baldwin in Peck Reference Peck2016)”
As critics foresaw in autumn 2020, years of complicated negotiations among EU institutions, member states, and stakeholders followed the Pact’s initial announcement. The winter of 2023–2024 saw some denouement in a concentrated effort to “showcase” the Pact before the June 2024 European elections, according to the European Parliament’s (EP) president Roberta Metsola. A jumbo trilogue (European Parliament-Commission-Council) took place in December 2023 that led to an agreement between the EP and Council that for some, mostly EU officials, was “historic” and for others, “a devastating blow to the right to seek asylum in the EU” with the Council amendments worsening the initial 2020 outline of the Pact (BVMN 2023). This was followed by EP voting in favor of it on 10 April 2024 and the formal adoption by the Council of the EU a month later.
Shortly after the “historic” agreement in late December 2023, the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) called out the European Parliament and the Commission for jointly commemorating the abolition of the slave trade, with an avowal to tackle structural racism, while simultaneously approving the new Migration Pact in the same month (Avsec Reference Avsec2023). For ENAR and others, the New Pact “is a step in the opposite direction, signaling that those who do not fit imagined stereotypes of Europeanness are unwelcome—not due to Europe’s inability to provide protection but solely because of their non-whiteness” (Avsec Reference Avsec2023, 4). MEPs of the left considered the final version “a historic bow to the right-wing populists” (Left Group in the European Parliament 2023) while ECRE (the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, an alliance of a hundred twenty-two NGOs protecting and advancing rights of refugees and asylum seekers) called it “a dark day for Europe” (2023). Fifty other civil society organizations sent an open letter in the eleventh hour, urging co-legislators to reconsider the Pact. Civil society organizations continued to officially express their critical concerns in the spring of 2024, emphasizing the importance of allowing them to have input on national implementation plans and to actively participate in the human rights monitoring mechanisms outlined in the Pact (Statewatch 2024). The key dangers they identify are the following: the normalization of the arbitrary use of immigration detention, the increase in racial profiling, “the use of “crisis” procedures to enable pushbacks, and return individuals to so-called “safe third countries” where they are at risk of violence, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment” (Bouvier Reference Bouvier2023). I focus on these latter two dimensions below, rehistoricizing them as contemporary reactivations of a longer European colonial history of racialization and exclusion.
Crisis and Emergency Law in the Pact
The crisis procedures that civil society organizations warn against refer to the Pact’s crisis regulation. According to it, member states are authorized to derogate from certain rules—for instance, those concerning the registration of asylum applications or the asylum border procedure—in crisis situations and exceptional circumstances. The New Pact classifies crises in three broad categories: (a) crisis—mass influx of refugees in one or more member states; (b) crisis—instrumentalization, “where migrants are instrumentalised for political purposes to overwhelm the capacities of and destabilize the member state of destination;” and (c) force majeure, such as a pandemic or a natural disaster (EC 2024). In other words, EU member states are allowed to deviate from international legal obligations during refugee or migrant crises.
Literature discusses how the concept of refugee or migration crisis is heavily ideologically driven and primarily used to justify perceived urgency (Fotou Reference Fotou, Machin and Meidert2021), including various “special measures” that lack transparency and evade accountability (Krzyżanowski et al. Reference Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou and Wodak2018, 3). Reynolds similarly argues that “the conception of a migration ‘emergency’ provides tactical scope for European states to further harden their border regimes at opportune moments” (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2021, 1768). I argue that the crisis trope—especially in the form of emergency law, as in the EU Pact, where states are allowed to deviate from their standard obligations—is embedded in a colonial history in which the notion of emergency was constitutive of colonial rule and racialized subjectivities. Of course, the idea that a situation posing an actual threat to the state’s existence permits the suspension of the legal framework is acknowledged in nearly all discussions of lawful governance, from John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu to Carl Schmitt and most modern state constitutions. However, questions of crisis and emergency law have particularly shaped colonial rule, as Nasser Hussain (Reference Hussain2003) demonstrated in his insightful exploration of colonialism and the rule of law with examples from British colonial India. Emergency, both as an interpretive question in the law and as an administrative practice—such as the suspension of habeas corpus in India, the declaration of martial law in Punjab, or French colonial-era legislation during the Algerian War—co-constituted the rule of law in colonies (Hussain Reference Hussain2003; Stoler Reference Stoler2011; 2016). States of emergency were used to “impose a sense of order upon its subordinates by means of violence rendered legible, legal, and legitimate by its own sovereign word” (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2006, 30). Reynolds’ own understanding of “emergency law as a racialising component of sovereignty” stems from global colonial contexts in which the effects of a state of emergency were inherently contingent on race (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2021, 1778). Xanthopoulou reinforces this argument, calling the EU’s use of emergency a neocolonial trope, which may be presented as a new norm, but “was developed by European colonies, normalizing special state powers over colonial subjects” (Xanthopoulou Reference Xanthopoulou2024, 115).
This analysis exemplifies the method of rehistoricization by tracing how the EU’s invocation of “crisis” and “emergency” reproduces the legal and discursive templates first consolidated under colonial rule. By situating contemporary derogations from international law within the genealogy of colonial emergency governance, rehistoricization reveals how crisis functions not as an exceptional rupture but as a recurring mode of racialised order-making. This approach transforms what might otherwise appear as a novel policy mechanism into a continuation of historically sedimented logics of control.
As an example of crisis situations identified in the Pact’s crisis regulation, the European Commission cites the 2015 migration crisis (EC 2020). However, this is neither the first nor the only “crisis” invoked by the EU in its long project of securitizing migration: the movements of people following the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 in North Africa and the Middle East were also framed in crisis terms, as existential emergencies for the EU (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2021, 1789). The trend of migration-induced “crises” for Europe begins as early as the 1980s with increased arrivals from the Global South. Crises seem to follow one after another, suggesting what Ammaturo (Reference Ammaturo2019, 562) describes as the “establishment of a chronic state of crisis” for the EU. These flows are presented as being fundamentally different from earlier refugee movements within Europe; arrivals from the Global South clash with how a “normal refugee” was historically constructed—white, male, and anti-communist—leading to what Chimni calls the post–Cold War “myth of difference” (Chimni Reference Chimni1998, 351).
The colonial uses of “crisis” illuminate this continuity further. British authorities in colonial India invoked states of emergency—from the Defence of India Acts of 1915 and 1939 to the declaration of martial law in Punjab—as legal tools to contain unrest by redefining entire populations as threats to order (Hussain Reference Hussain2003). Similarly, in French Algeria, the 1955–62 state of emergency suspended civil liberties and legal protections in the name of maintaining stability (Thomas and Asselin Reference Thomas and Asselin2022). These examples demonstrate that “crisis” has long functioned as a legal technology of racialized governance—a frame that legitimates exceptional power through claims of necessity. By rehistoricizing the EU Pact’s crisis provisions through these genealogies, the analysis shows that contemporary European emergency regimes inherit and update the colonial logic of crisis as racial order.
Connected to Europe’s racialized anxieties vis-à-vis this “myth of difference,” there is a resulting shift in asylum law toward repatriation and the concept of “preventive protection,” undermining migrants’ traditional right to leave dangerous situations, civil wars, or violence. This has worked to create “an incremental and invisible policy wall around the EU” (Hyndman and Mountz Reference Hyndman and Mountz2008, 252, 262). The arrivals of the “new asylum seekers” (Lemberg-Pedersen Reference Lemberg-Pedersen2019) from what used to be the colonial periphery—so often people of color—are presented as something novel (reflecting the eternal presentism of migration issues) and fundamentally different from what Europe is accustomed to, hence the emergency framing of surrounding narratives. This perception, however, is rooted not in fact but in a racial–colonial imaginary that underpins European sovereignty. The colonial origins of these population movements are equally ignored; postcolonial societies and states are blamed for displacement, while colonial legacies and neocolonial, development-induced poverty remain unacknowledged. International law and institutions—co-constituted by racialized hierarchies, as discussed earlier—follow suit in solidifying exclusion. Thus, the narratives of crisis, states of emergency, and force majeure, and the ways they are used by the EU to allow member states’ derogations from legal obligations, reproduce colonial legacies even as crisis-response measures “consolidate Europe’s racial borders” (Reynolds Reference Reynolds2021, 1773).
Both the “chronic state of crisis” and the “myth of difference,” used by the EU to normalize and legitimize an immobility and non-entry regime for the Global South (Chimni Reference Chimni1998; Turner Reference Turner2007), are solidified in the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. This regime has clear racialized and colonial characteristics: it involves and impacts states in the Global South, often former colonies, whose citizens are immobilized and, by extension, placed in harm’s way. With its emphasis on repatriation and containment, responsibility for prevention, protection, and intervention falls squarely on the Global North—responsibilities that have imperial and colonial genealogies well established in the literature (Glanville Reference Glanville2022; Mallavarapu Reference Mallavarapu, Thakur and Maley2015). The EU’s attachment to a legal regime of non-entry, as framed in the New Pact, is thus destined to exclude the racialized, crimmigrant other arriving from the Global South. The legal shift briefly presented above links to the “safe third country” concept—namely, the international partnerships and border externalization discussed in the next section. Through this rehistoricization of the EU Pact’s crisis framework, the article demonstrates that contemporary emergency governance is not a response to new conditions but a reactivation of colonial temporalities of control.
Externalization: Partnerships with the Global South
The “safe third country” concept is only one aspect of border externalization. EU externalization or extraterritorialization is functionally defined as “the attempt to transfer the EU’s rules and policies (acquis communautaire) to third countries and international organisations.” (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig Reference Lavenex and Schimmelfennig2009, 791 cited in Jaulin et al. Reference Jaulin, Mesnard, Savatic, Senne and Thiollet2020). In the context of immigration, externalization can be understood as “state actions to prevent migrants, including asylum seekers, from entering the legal jurisdiction or territories of destination countries or regions, or making them legally inadmissible without individually considering the merits of their protection claims” (Frelick et al. Reference Frelick, Kysel and Podkul2016, 193). Apart from “safe third country” regulations, Rodier (Reference Rodier2006) considers externalization to include border surveillance and interception at sea, detention camps, readmission agreements, carrier sanctions, immigration liaison officers network deployment, and regional protection and resettlement programs, therefore she includes both relocation and transfer of responsibility. Other authors view externalization more narrowly “as the subcontracting or outsourcing of border controls” who “consider only pre-border surveillance as a form of externalisation, while detection and apprehension at borders, post-arrival processing, and repatriation constitute traditional control-oriented approaches to managing unauthorized migration” (Jaulin et al. Reference Jaulin, Mesnard, Savatic, Senne and Thiollet2020, 21 citing Carling and Hernández-Carretero Reference Carling and Hernández-Carretero2011). More critical scholarship considers externalization to also include policies that “work through the humanitarian-development-cooperation frameworks to keep people out in an apparently benevolent way, while guaranteeing the EU’s continuous influence on African soil, calling it “soft” externalization (Cappiali and Pacciardi Reference Cappiali and Pacciardi2025, 7). In any way that it may be conceptualized, externalization in the New Pact involves the physical deterrence of people who desire to cross European borders assigned to states mainly in the Global South through international partnerships.
International partnerships, in the form of multilateral or bilateral agreements, between the EU or a European state with a third country, respectively, are perhaps one of externalization’s most visible policies. Examples include the 2008 Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between Italy and Libya, the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, or the recent UK-Rwanda one, which, despite the UK’s not being in the EU anymore, is still worth mentioning. Such partnerships figure widely in the media as migration containment by any means, being a salient topic in a European continent dominated by far-right, populist, and anti-immigrant parties. Partnerships with states in the Global South are supposed to implement the three policies of border control, return/readmission, and asylum screening by fencing and gatekeeping (Triandafyllidou Reference Triandafyllidou2014). As practices, fencing translates into actively targeting irregular migration (arrest and expulsion), while gatekeeping involves restricting legal access to a state (even if legally warranted, as in bona fide refugees) (Jaulin et al. Reference Jaulin, Mesnard, Savatic, Senne and Thiollet2020). EU border externalization has been an integral part of EU policy for many years, while the setting up of the European Border and Coast Guard agency (Frontex) in 2006 was also a further boost to it (Triandafyllidou Reference Triandafyllidou2014). According to the most recent update on the EC’s website, the New Pact on Migration and Asylum further strengthens this strategic commitment “by building on current EU migration partnership frameworks while at the same time reinforcing them through “tailor-made partnerships” with third countries” (EC 2024).
The 2005 European Council established the Global Approach to Migration (GAM), a strategic policy commitment for the EU to address “the management of legal migration, the prevention and reduction of illegal migration, and the relation between migration and development” (EC 2008, 1), focused on what was conceived as a crisis in the southern Mediterranean and northwest Africa. The emergency in this case came on the occasion of the repeated attempts of sub-Saharan migrants to scale the fences between Morocco and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in the early autumn of 2005. Grossly exaggerated in western media reporting, the attempts of a few hundred people to cross over to European territory were presented in broadly derogatory terms, as a mass invasion, a plague, or outright racist terms by European and Moroccan media: “‘Black locusts’ are taking over Morocco!” ran the headline of the Arabic-language Tangier newspaper al-Shamal (Goldschmidt Reference Goldschmidt2006). Over a few days, more than 100 prospective migrants were wounded, and an estimated number of 15 were killed, either by Spanish or Moroccan live ammunition or by falling/being thrown from the barriers (Goldschmidt Reference Goldschmidt2006). The events had a rippling effect on Moroccan politics with a crackdown on undocumented Africans arrested in the area adjoining the fences who were then deported to Algeria through unofficial checkpoints (the Algerian-Moroccan border has been closed since 1994) or abandoned without water, food or shelter in a semi-desert area called No Man’s Land by the MSF reporting on the incidents (MSF, 2005). The move is reminiscent of Mbembe’s discussion on the postcolony on how racial categories, ethnic divisions, and cultural hierarchies entrenched by colonial regimes persist in the postcolonial state (Mbembe Reference Mbembe1992); colonial states acting as colonial guards.
From the European side of the fence, the Spanish socialist government deported immigrants to their countries of origin (Soddu Reference Soddu2006, 213) and announced a three-million-euro project to raise the fences up to six meters. For the EU, this offered it the occasion to push political relationships with states of the Global South further. Externalization in other EU bordering areas followed and extended beyond the immediate borderline with European soil; tracing migrant itineraries even deeper on ex-colonial territory in Africa and Asia up to places of origin, the EC used the concept of “migratory routes” to deal with migration “up-stream” (Casas-Cortes et al. Reference Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias and Pickles2015).
Casas-Cortes et al. posit that the EU externalization strategy required a “new spatial imaginary.” A new geography of border control arose that extended beyond the limits of the territorial state, and which was implemented by “the spatial and institutional stretching of border policy” (Casas-Cortes et al. Reference Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias and Pickles2015, 904; their emphasis). In the initiating case I just described, this involved pushing the EU borders “from the fences of Ceuta/Melilla into Morocco, Mali, and Mauritania” and beyond (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015, 905). Tracking migratory routes was not the only issue at stake. New and wider forms of integration and political cooperation with the Global South, involving, but not limited to, policing, trade relations, and development aid with often problematic conditionalities (ECRE 2020).
Contra Casas et al., I argue that there is nothing “new” in this spatial imaginary and institutional stretching. While the institutional pathway to international partnerships may have acquired new labels (“strategic commitments,” GAM, pillars, trilogues) or evolved organizationally for a regional actor like the EU, the partnerships themselves present neocolonial characteristics and are deeply rooted in colonial and racial hierarchies. By rehistoricizing the EU’s externalization strategy, this article interprets such partnerships as contemporary reactivations of older imperial techniques of indirect rule, whereby European powers governed mobility, trade, and policing through protectorates and delegated intermediaries. Rehistoricization makes visible how the outsourcing of migration control to the Global South reproduces the colonial outsourcing of frontier management to buffer zones and intermediary states.
In these partnerships, migration clauses and commitments for Global South states go hand in hand with neocolonial practices: operational and financial support from the Global North, assistance with border policing, deployment of EU police forces and private companies, trade concessions or development aid, all riddled with conditionalities. The cooperation is asymmetrical, with EU funding—including development assistance—conditioned on aligning with EU migration aims such as increased readmission numbers (ECRE 2020). This asymmetry is particularly evident in “talent partnerships,” launched with Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which ostensibly offer mobility opportunities yet remain plagued by “negative conditionality” and visa leverage (Bisong Reference Bisong2020; Rasche Reference Rasche2021). The 2018 EU–Ethiopia readmission arrangement—secured only after delaying Trust Fund disbursements—shows how leverage is used to compel compliance.
Historically, similar asymmetries defined colonial protectorates: British indirect rule in West and East Africa tasked “native authorities” with enforcing passport, labor, and residency restrictions (Cooper Reference Cooper1996; Mamdani Reference Mamdani2012); French gendarmeries patrolled North and West African coasts (Wadia Reference Wadia2018), and Italian colonial administrations in Libya and Eritrea relied on “native guards” (Arielli Reference Arielli2015). Rehistoricizing EU externalization through these precedents reveals how contemporary “cooperation” reproduces the logic of delegated enforcement and conditional dependency. The EU’s insistence on “readmission cooperation” recalls colonial treaties requiring African authorities to return “runaway labourers” (Cooper Reference Cooper1996), while the geographic displacement of European border enforcement onto African soil echoes the French cordon sanitaire (Packard Reference Packard1989) or the British Arab Bureau’s interwar surveillance networks (Satia Reference Satia2008).
This dynamic is similarly visible in Frontex operations in Africa. From Operation Hera (2006) in the waters of Senegal, Mauritania, Cape Verde, and Morocco to liaison officers, training of local border guards, and migration data networks, Frontex resurrects the infrastructures of colonial outposts. Despite evidence of pushbacks and misconduct documented by OLAF (2021), the New Pact strengthens Frontex’s role, often under agreements that include criminal and civil immunity clauses (Statewatch 2022).
The colonial legacy of racialized humanness and deservingness also permeates border externalization. Deciding who is “worthy” of crossing borders—or structuring access around “talent,” utility, or Western needs—resurrects colonial hierarchies of merit and civilization. The Global North–South divide thus becomes a Global Mobility divide (Mau et al. Reference Mau, Gülzau, Laube and Zaun2015), reinforced by models of “containment development” (Landau Reference Landau2019), whereby aid is conditioned on keeping Third World populations contained beyond the First World (Achiume Reference Achiume2019). These practices exacerbate the vulnerability of refugees and migrants, producing extreme levels of violence, imprisonment, and deaths in the Mediterranean corridors and along overland routes. Border externalization also reshapes racial hierarchies within partner states: the EU–Turkey deal, for example, has intensified labor shortages and inequalities affecting Turkish citizens themselves (Landherr Reference Landherr2024), demonstrating that externalization governs not only those seeking entry into Europe but also those who remain.
A further neocolonial dimension lies in the commodification of European control of mobility (Lemberg-Pedersen et al. Reference Lemberg-Pedersen, Fett, Mayblin, Sahraoui and Stambøl2022). Civipol—a semi-private French entity part-owned by defence firms—implements EU-funded border projects across former French colonies, from detention centers to biometrics and civil registry reforms (Stambøl and Jegen Reference Stambøl, Jegen, Lemberg-Pedersen, Fett, Mayblin, Sahraoui and Stambøl2022). This public–private nexus parallels concessionary companies such as the British South Africa Company or the Royal Niger Company, revealing the persistent entanglement of private profit, population control, and imperial governance.
By situating EU externalization within these longer colonial genealogies, the method of rehistoricization exposes how contemporary partnerships, conditionalities, and securitized humanitarianism operate as reformulations of imperial governance. This methodological move forms one of the article’s central contributions to critical migration studies, showing that EU “tailor-made partnerships” are less innovative tools than continuities of Europe’s colonial management of mobility. This article does not present the EU’s neighbors as passive recipients—regional actors such as the African Union wield agency—but the power asymmetry crystallized in the New Pact nonetheless creates conditions in which “border externalization can be seen as a continuation of the organizing logics of the colonial matrix of power” (Lemberg-Pedersen Reference Lemberg-Pedersen2019). Taken together, these continuities between colonial and contemporary forms of externalized control show that the EU’s border regime cannot be understood merely as a policy innovation but as a reenactment of Europe’s longer imperial history of governing mobility—an understanding that the conclusion now turns to in order to reflect on the ethical and political stakes of this rehistoricization.
Conclusion
“recognising the reality of racial aphasia links our racist pasts to the still racist present, perhaps connected by collective silences as much as by the persistence of oppression, domination and inequality” (Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Anievas, Manchanda and Routledge2014, 45).
“Europe could one day no longer be European and even become black because millions want to come to Europe” (Gaddafi quoted in Il Messaggero 2010, my translation). This oft-cited anecdote on the occasion of the signing of the Italian–Libyan Friendship Treaty in 2010 is presented as Gaddafi’s brazen effort to extract money from Europe (five billion euros) to contain prospective migrants from leaving Libyan shores. Playing up to European fears, Gaddafi referred to “barbarian invasions” by “hungry and uneducated Africans” and Islam becoming “the religion of all of Europe” in the same speech, in an exercise of anti-immigrant racist fearmongering. Interestingly, Gaddafi’s attention-grabbing quote overshadowed Berlusconi’s preceding comments that “with the Treaty a wound has closed” (Il Messaggero 2010, my translation). The wound the Italian prime minister referred to was, of course, Italy’s colonial presence in Libya. Assigning colonial occupation to the photographic archive and the history book, Berlusconi invited everyone to look optimistically into the future, where Italian investments in Libya could be configured as a kind of reparation. Yet this very deal underpinned the pushbacks later condemned by the European Court of Human Rights (Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy 2012), and a new agreement was signed with Libya’s post-revolutionary authorities only months after Gaddafi’s demise (Megerisi and Martini Reference Megerisi and Martini2023). A colonial wound closing, or being reopened in a neocolonial register?
This article has argued that the New Pact on Migration and Asylum must be read as part of precisely this unresolved colonial wound. The Pact does not inaugurate a new paradigm but continues a European history of racialized exclusion. Through its crisis regulation, it normalizes emergency as a legal technology that allows derogations from international obligations in ways that further immobilize racialized subjects. Through its international partnerships, it embeds border externalization in a neocolonial matrix where conditionality, leverage, and security cooperation impose the costs of “European” border control on the Global South while exposing migrants and refugees to heightened violence, precarity, and death. Byzantine in its complexity and “Orbán-esque in its cruelty to refugees” (ECRE 2023), the Pact fails on its own terms: it will not end irregular movement, it will not produce orderly mobility, and it certainly does not embody the humane, value-based system it claims to represent (Megerisi and Martini Reference Megerisi and Martini2023). Instead, it consolidates racialized notions of undeservingness and offers the EU further tools to discipline third countries and to legitimize restrictive reforms in Member State law.
The article’s central theoretical contribution has been to show how a rehistoricization of the Pact unsettles the pervasive presentism and racial aphasia of mainstream migration scholarship. Rather than treating crisis procedures and externalization measures as recent innovations, I have located them within longer histories of colonial emergency rule and indirect governance of mobility. Rehistoricizing the Crisis Regulation exposes how the Pact reactivates colonial modalities of exception: crises are framed as moments when legality may be suspended in order to restore order, and the subjects most affected are, as in imperial contexts, racialized populations whose mobility is cast as inherently threatening. Rehistoricizing the International Partnerships Pillar reveals parallel continuities: conditional “cooperation,” “talent partnerships,” readmission agreements, and security assistance echo earlier protectorate arrangements and concessionary regimes that outsourced coercive functions to local authorities while preserving European control over territory, resources, and movement.
Methodologically, then, the article proposes rehistoricization as a concrete way of bringing the coloniality of migration into analyses of EU governance. By embedding the Pact within the longue durée of colonial power, the article moves beyond analogical uses of “colonial” as metaphor and instead identifies how specific institutional forms, legal instruments, and geographies of enforcement persist, mutate, and are re-activated. My analysis is part of the theoretical effort to counteract the “mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath” (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1998, 4), a “vast act of racialised forgetting” in liberal political theory as Phillip Cole identifies (Reference Cole2000, 197). This speaks back to critical migration studies in two ways. First, it provides a tool for addressing the EU’s supranational complexity: rather than treating bureaucratic opacity and multi-level governance as purely contemporary quirks, rehistoricization situates them in an imperial genealogy of diffused responsibility and delegated violence. Second, it challenges the field’s tendency to treat migration control as a post-1945, largely race-neutral policy domain. The analysis here has shown that what appears as technocratic crisis management or pragmatic partnership is in fact structured by older hierarchies of humanness, deservingness, and mobility. In this sense, the article has been conceived as a theoretically oriented intervention that clarifies how racial aphasia and presentist analyses obscure the colonial continuities structuring EU migration governance, while establishing an analytical foundation for future empirically grounded research examining how these dynamics unfold across institutional practices and externalization arrangements.
Substantively, the article has demonstrated that the Pact’s crisis and externalization architectures deepen what scholars describe as a global mobility divide (Mau et al. Reference Mau, Gülzau, Laube and Zaun2015). Emergency provisions legitimate derogations that build an “invisible policy wall” around Europe (Hyndman and Mountz Reference Hyndman and Mountz2008), while partnerships and conditionalities transform neighboring and more distant states into buffer zones tasked with containing racialized populations far from European territory. These arrangements not only expose migrants and refugees to systematic rights violations but also reshape political economies and racial hierarchies within partner states—illustrated, for instance, by the labor-market distortions brought about by the EU–Turkey deal (Landherr Reference Landherr2024). At the same time, the commodification of mobility control through entities such as Civipol ties border externalization to profit-driven security industries whose roots lie in colonial concession companies.
Finally, the article has insisted that confronting racialization and coloniality is not an optional add-on but a precondition for any meaningful critique of European migration governance. The Pact crystallizes a broader pattern in which Europe presents itself as post-racial and postcolonial while systematically enacting policies that differentiate between those who may move and those who must be contained. To oppose this, migration research must abandon the fiction of color-blind law and neutral crisis management. As Omi and Winant remind us, “opposing racism requires that we notice race” (Reference Omi and Winant1995, 159); I would add that opposing the racial violence of EU border practices requires that we also notice empire.
Recognizing the Pact as a reenactment of colonial modalities of crisis and externalization does not offer easy solutions, but it clarifies the terrain on which resistance and alternative futures must be imagined. It brings into view not only the continuity of European power but also the agencies—of migrants, of Global South states, of social movements—that contest this power. Against the comforting narrative of closed wounds and new beginnings, rehistoricization insists that Europe’s borders remain saturated with the afterlives of empire, and that any just rethinking of migration governance must begin by naming, rather than disavowing, that fact.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to Amal Abu-Bakare for her help and guidance and to the reviewers and editor of this journal for their very useful comments and suggestions. The University of Leicester provided a period of study leave, which enabled me to complete the first draft of this article.
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