https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3559-1256
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ABSTRACT
Ripple effects of European border externalisation have transformed everyday life in the Tunisian coastal town of Zarzis. Building on ethnographic fieldwork among artisanal fishermen, and actors involved in two migrant cemeteries in Zarzis, the article provides an understanding of entangled processes and of how violence and death co-exist in the externalised borderlands of the EU. The felt and lived embeddedness and simultaneity of otherwise separately viewed policy issues is revealed through a focus on intersecting processes coming together in one place. The article analyses the ripple effects of these policies on third actors (the fishermen), the environment (marine life), and space (two migrant cemeteries) in Zarzis. The article unpacks how externalisation translates into human rights abuses, environmental crisis, and death, and how these are distinctly intertwined. I propose the concept ‘felt externalisation’ as a theoretical contribution which ties together the three core themes: the actors, the environment, and the space. In doing so, the article brings together three different, yet interrelated dimensions of border externalisation that are still largely understudied in the literature. By looking at externalisation from a spatial and geographically situated angle the paper makes not only an empirical but also a conceptual and theoretical contribution, by seeking to expand the empirical basis but also the very meaning of externalisation and its effects, in the extended EU borderland.
Acknowledgements
I am first and foremost grateful to the Fishermen’s Association and all the fishermen in Zarzis I met, especially Slaheddine Mcharek and Chamsedinne Bourassine. Thank you for inviting me into your spaces, offices and ports and allowing me to listen and learn. I am also grateful to Chamsedinne Marzoug and Rachid Koraichi for all our conversations and visits to the cemeteries. I also thank the members of the colloquium ‘The End of Externalization? Migration, Politics and New Configurations of the Border Spectacle’ at Sciences Po CERI in Paris for their generous feedback following a presentation of an earlier version of the paper. I thank Hans Lucht, Steffen Jensen, and Henrik Rønsbo for their support and guidance, and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Ethics Statement
The research has been reviewed and obtained approval from DIIS Research Council. Despite the absence of an ethics committee in my university (and more generally in Denmark), throughout the research, I have striven to maintain high ethical standards by ensuring that my presence in the field and my interactions caused no harm to research participants. Ethical guidelines on informed consent, confidentiality, safe data storage, and the ‘do no harm principle’ have been applied throughout.
Notes
1. École Supérieure de Pêche Zarzis, Tunisia.
2. Association le pêcheur pour le développement et l’environnement.
3. The term haraga, literally ‘burning’, is used throughout North Africa to refer to the symbolic ‘burning of the border’ involved in the crossing of the Mediterranean by migrants without papers. The haraga are ‘those who burn their identification documents’ – some literally, most metaphorically – and who leave for Europe with neither passports nor visas.
4. I have used a simplified transliteration of Arabic to stay true to the pronunciation of the Tunisian dialect (derija) as spoken locally.
5. The name has been changed to protect anonymity.
7. In 2012 a Tunisian fisherman was killed by bullets fired from a Libyan Coast Guard boat, while the other 18 members of the crew were taken to Tripoli. In 2015, four Tunisian fishing boats that had entered Libyan waters were taken hostage by Libyan militias and forced to the port of Zawiya. In February 2016, thirteen Tunisian trawlers with seventy sailors on board were boarded and taken to the same port of Zawiya, where the Libyans demanded a ransom for their release. The following year, in 2017, Libyan fishermen from Zawiya threatened to kidnap all the Tunisian fishermen they met at sea in retaliation for the inspection of a Libyan trawler in Sfax by the Tunisian coastguard (see Bisiaux and Jonville 2020). Since then, hostage-taking has multiplied, Amin’s case being the most recent at the time of fieldwork.
8. According to the UN International Convention of the Law of the Sea signed in 1982 by all states in the European Union, states have a zone of 12 nautical miles (22.2 kilometres) around their coasts within which their own law applies. Fish stocks and mineral resources in these zones belong to them. Beyond that, there is a further 12-nautical-mile zone called a ‘contiguous zone’ where states can continue to enforce laws in four areas: customs, taxation, immigration, and pollution (Bathke 2019).
9. Bourassine was incarcerated in a jail in Agrigento, in the southern part of Sicily, alongside his crew after rescuing 14 migrants some 24 miles off Lampedusa. His fishing boat was seized and Bourassine – along with his five-member crew – faced many years in jail for allegedly aiding and abetting illegal immigration. For more on this case see Zagaria 2018 and ANSA 2018.
10. ḥarrāga, ḥarrāg, literally ‘those who burn’ is the colloquial word used in the Maghreb for undocumented migration.
11. The prices per person to Lampedusa can range from 4000–7000 TND (appr. 1300–2300 USD).
12. 1 USD is approx. 3 TND, so triple their selling price.
13. His name has been changed to protect anonymity.
14. The increase in water temperature is considered to be the main factor in epidemics affecting the principal commercial sponge species (Hippospongia communis) that lives in Tunisian waters. See: Peters 1993.
15. Gabès has various chemical industries, focused on the transformation of phosphate, with the production of phosphoric acid, diammonium phosphate, and dicalcium phosphate. About 10 factories are located in the Gabès region, including the Tunisian chemical group (GCT), whose main activity is to transform approximately 3.5 million tons per year of phosphate from the mining basin of the Gafsa region into phosphoric acid and fertilisers. See: Azouni 2022.
16. From interviews with forensics doctor in Sfax, Tunisia, November 2021.
17. MSF has long been carrying out activities related to migration (mainly consisting of medical assistance to migrants) in both European (e.g. Italy and Greece) and North African countries (e.g. Tunisia, Libya and Egypt).
18. In October 2022, while I was on a short fieldtrip to Tunis, news broke out that a bout carrying 18 Tunisians had shipwrecked weeks ago. Since the day of the shipwreck, families and citizens have been staging demonstrations in Zarzis, and a strike on October 18, blaming authorities for mismanagement, including delays in search operations, intentionally misleading the families as well as their alleged burial without identification in the migrant cemeteries. For more on this case see Tabbabi 2022.
19. Koraichi was born in Ain Beida, Algeria. An acclaimed artist who travels between Paris, Berlin and New York. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale, MOMA, in the collection of the National Museum of African Art, Washington DC and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. ‘Everywhere, except Algeria, my home country’, he tells me laughing.
20. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the local actors and politics of death concerning the cemeteries. See Zagaria (2019a, 2020) for more on Le Cimetière des Inconnus and former fisherman Chamsedinne Marzoug. There have also been extensive international news article publications, documentaries, and crowdfunding campaigns particularly concerning Le Cimetière des Inconnus and Chamsedinne Marzoug.
21. Main road to Libya.