Deportation, Deportabilities and racial formations: Colonial continuities of European deportation practices and their externalization

Abstract

This thesis explores the European migration control and its externalization in its colonial continuities, through the focus on the entanglement of deportations, deportabilities and racial formations. In doing so, this thesis echoes the demand for critical migration and border studies that consider colonial continuities and thus create a nuanced understanding of migration control, omitting neither temporal and spatial particularities nor continuities, and heightening the perception of the relations of domination to which the control of mobilities is always tied to. In order to approach these complex relations, the question is raised: “How are deportations, deportabilities and racial formations entangled in and through the European control of migrant mobilities and the externalization of this control?” Thus, the complex entanglement of deportations and racial formations is approached not alone in the actual moment of deportation, but also in the prospect of deportations: the condition of being liable to deportation. Based on decolonial conceptualizations of racial formations, I address this question in three different spatiotemporal sites: using different sources and the colonial imaginaries revealed or contained therein, I examine the entanglement of deportations, deportabilities and racial formations in Switzerland, in the Central Mediterranean and in Algeria. This enables to demonstrate the particularities but also structural similarities of this entanglement in different spatiotemporal sites. Further, this question is examined considering the interconnections between different deportations practices and racial formations through the increasing outsourcing of European migration control and deportations. Thus, this thesis contributes to a rethinking of deportations and deportabilities and their outsourcing as a racialized and racializing mechanism that is deeply embedded in relations of domination – and therewith, it is intended to contribute to the repoliticization of the often unnoticed and normalized bordering practice of deportation.