Description
This paper explores two forms of overt violence suffered by the racialised and dispossessed in north west Africa, detailing the relationship the EU has to each of them. These two forms are the ongoing “biopolitical and necropolitical modalities of control” (Stierl and Dadusc, 2021) that characterise EU external border policies in the Mediterranean, and the civilian fatalities and human displacement that mark many regions of the Sahel in which France and the EU are engaged in counterinsurgency operations. While varying in degree of European causal responsibility, each of these forms of direct violence are marked by an asymmetry familiar from the colonial era; namely, an extreme level of violence in colonial territories occurring at the same time as a process of pacification and liberalisation in the European colonial metropole. In the contemporary era, this process of pacification and liberalisation is embodied in the process of European integration, and the creation of an internally borderless space and a common foreign and security policy that it has entailed. Thus, insofar as European integration “inside” is complemented by violence and death “outside” – in the Mediterranean and the Sahel – this violent colonial asymmetry also remains. Drawing on interviews with EU officials stationed in the Sahel (Mauritania), ethnographic accounts of migrants’ experiences of violence in the region, and analysis of EU policy documents, this paper details the relationship between experiences of violence and displacement in the Mediterranean and the Sahel, on the one hand, and the policies that govern these experiences on the other. From this vantage point, the colonial asymmetry of violence is suggested to be foundational to the European project.
