Description
This article examines how EU–Tunisia cooperation has evolved from the language of prevention and democratisation in the 2010s to the security-driven frameworks of migration management that crystallised after the 2023 EU–Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding. It argues that rather than a rupture, this shift represents the afterlife of earlier governance techniques—risk assessment, partner vetting, resilience indicators, and project audit cultures—originally institutionalised through EU-funded programmes on P/CVE and democracy promotion. Drawing on postcolonial and critical security studies, the article conceptualises this evolution as a process of circulating governance, in which liberal techniques of development are rearticulated as instruments of border control. Using a longitudinal analysis of EU policy documents, funding decisions, and implementer materials, the paper traces how these techniques migrate across policy domains and acquire new functions in the management of mobility and containment. By linking past and present interventions, the article highlights how contemporary border governance in North Africa is sustained by the bureaucratic and epistemic infrastructures of earlier “preventive” cooperation, revealing the enduring entanglement between development, security, and the reproduction of postcolonial hierarchies in the EU’s external action.
