The making of EU external border control

Border control is usually considered a sovereign prerogative of nation states. In the framework of the EU, however, border control is increasingly subject to cooperative schemes at the strategic, operational and tactical level, involving EU representatives and officials of Member States, as well as representatives of so-called 'third countries' - but also of international organisations and the private sector. Based on multi-sited ethnographic work conducted at the Evros border between Greece and Turkey, among the Union's bureaucracies in Brussels and at the headquarters of the EU's external border agency FRONTEX, this piece aims at analysing the making of border control in transnational conditions. We survey the various authorities involved in this process and the tensions generated by divergencies in the practical logics that they mobilise. In the framework of this panel, we ask in particular whether the identification of a 'centre' and its 'margins' or 'peripheries' can be taken for granted. The notion of a European external migration policy, we suggest, should be challenged not only with regard to its putative unity, but also on the grounds of the notions of 'inside' and 'outside' that it conveys.