Europe's Maritime Borders and Their Urban Undoing

This paper argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the role played by meso-level structures, such as cities and urban regions, in the EU’s ongoing attempts (and failures) to ‘manage’ its maritime borders in the face of increasing volumes of irregular migration from the South. On the one hand, a disproportionate amount of attention has been paid to “mobilities” and to the immigration side of the story, leaving spatially-bounded (immobile) social processes and departure contexts comparatively under-studied. And on the other hand, an intellectual division of the labour has kept the analytical tools of urban and regional studies largely separate from those used to study the dynamics and policies shaping irregular transnational migration by sea. Building on a growing body of recent work seeking to address this imbalance, this paper sheds light on the city/migration nexus in the context of the EU’s fraught attempts to ‘secure’ its maritime borders in the era of the Arab Spring. 

To do so, this paper focuses on Zarzis, one of Tunisia’s southern-most port-cities, located in a part of the country that is among the farthest from any European territory. Due to this distance, it does not seem like a very opportune location from which to embark on a risky maritime journey to the Italian island of Lampedusa, the closest European port of arrival. 

However, following the revolution in 2011, rather than pick one of Tunisia’s many other port-cities—almost all of which are much closer to Lampedusa—a disproportionate amount of people from all over the country appear to have used Zarzis to cross the sea to Europe. I was able to confirm the reality of this event over the course of five weeks of fieldwork a year later in 2012, which comprised over 50 semi-structured interviews with local actors and returned migrants, as well as the collection and analysis of several quantitative databases that serve as proxy indicators of migratory phenomena in the city: some 40-70% of the 25,000 Tunisians that arrived in Italy during the first five months of 2011 appear to have departed from the port-city of Zarzis. 

This is a puzzle: why would this many people choose to leave from such an unlikely point in space, when several seemingly better alternatives exist? Answering this question not only involves overcoming the aforementioned divisions in the intellectual labour. It requires that we understand the meso-level processes underlying the macro-level restructurings of territorial sovereignty in the EU’s southern neighbourhood. By situating the phenomenon of irregular infra-Mediterranean migration back within the local social and material context that gives rise to it, I attempt to show that efforts by EU policy-makers and their southern counterparts to suppress such collectively organised and structurally embedded practices are at best counter-productive, and at worst serve to perpetuate a deadly and worsening instability.