Book Review: After Border Externalization: Migration, Race and Labour in Mauritania by Hassan Ould Moctar

Guest post by Imen El Amouri. Imen is a PhD researcher at Tilburg University, Department of Criminal Law. Her research focuses on asylum governance, harm, and mental health, with a particular emphasis on how racialized state practices and bureaucratic processes shape the lived experiences of refugees. 

Review of: After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania by Hassan Ould Moctar (Bloomsbury, 2024) 

When I stumbled upon After Border Externalization by Hassan Ould Moctar, I rushed to get a copy. I have been navigating the expanding literature on border externalization, where the increasing outsourcing of migration control to third countries has become an integral part of migration governance in the European context. As a Tunisian scholar observing my own country’s increasing entanglement in EU border governance, I needed to understand how externalization, as it has been practiced for more than two decades, has shaped nations, transformed them, harmed them, and increasingly interferes with their societies, cultures, and economies. Moctar’s book powerfully addresses these questions. Mauritania, subjected to externalization since at least 2002, offers an intricate case to understand how local, historical and social policies designed to manage migration play out and how far the consequences of these externalizations can go. Mauritania, as Moctar reminds us, is not a neutral participant in these dynamics. It is a former French colonial invention and now a central node in Europe’s Atlantic migration control strategy. 

At the heart of the book is a compelling analytical question: How can one afford the externalization process the detailed analytical attention it requires without absorbing its own Eurocentric assumptions? Drawing on Samir Amin's (1988) critique of eurocentrism, Achille Mbembe’s (2021) theory of late eurocentrism, and Dioesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) call to provincialize Europe, Moctar situates externalization within the overlapping continuities of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial systems, resisting the tendency to reduce postcolonial social formation to colonial legacies. In short, externalization does not operate in a vacuum.  

The book is structured in two parts. In the first half, Moctar offers a rich historical and theoretical framing of the Mauritanian context, mapping how colonial powers imposed a racial-territorial order that replaced fluid precolonial geographies governed by pastoralist and relational logics. Moctar’s central claim is that the EU migration regime interferes with three intersecting dimensions of territorial organization: spatial boundaries, human mobility, and group identity. Precolonial Mauritania was governed by pastoralist logics, where borders were fluid and belonging was relational. The French colonial state replaced this with a linear border regime, racializing the Senegal River as a divide between “Moors” and “Africans”. The colonial era thus introduced a qualitative shift in territorial organization. As Moctar powerfully puts it, colonialism did not invent racialization in Mauritania, but it weaved it onto territory in new ways. The postcolonial era, he argues, is characterized by a dual process: colonial conditioning of post-colonial context and a maintenance of that very state of colonial conditioning.  

Moctar remains faithful to ‘return the gaze’ by centralizing the subjects of externalization which he argues often fall short in externalization scholarship. The second half of the book introduces contemporary Mauritania through rich ethnographic accounts from three Mauritanian cities: Rosso, Nouadhibou, and Nouakchott. He centers those illegalized by the process, treating their experiences not as marginal but as diagnostic of broader political and economic logics. Migrants are not just victims here. They are subjects whose aspirations, refusals, and spiritual frameworks disrupt the border regime’s attempts to manage and contain them. 

Nouadhibou emerges as a site of informal economies and migrant agency, while being the node on the EU’s Atlantic border infrastructure. Drawing on Sandro Mezzadra’s concept of ‘living labour’, Moctar shows how migrants like Malata assert their presence even within exploitative structures, resisting the manageability expected by border and humanitarian infrastructures alike. In Rosso, Moctar departs from Europe-bound imaginaries to explore how local histories of displacement and informal border crossings complicate the notion of illegality. Here, border control operates in tandem with practices of racial exclusion that stem from the 1989 expulsions of Afro-Mauritanians, making visible the colonial logics of dispossession. And in Nouakchott, Moctar traces how the racialized population, Afro-Mauritanians and sub-Saharan Africans alike, are targeted not just by externalization policies, but also by municipal urban clearance, labor repression, and biometric exclusion, referring to the use of digital ID systems to deny or control access to rights and mobility. These overlapping forms of control reveal externalization as part of a broader political economy of disposability. 

When addressing agency, Moctar brings in the metaphysical, moving beyond a simple agency/structure binary by asking: how do people understand their own agency? The final chapter engages with Ibn Arabi’s notion of the ‘Oneness of Being’, arguing that a collective subjectivity rooted in the divine offers a different kind of universalism, one not anchored in Eurocentric rationalism, but in relational ontologies and cosmological continuity. In a world where secular migration frameworks often miss the sacred, this is a necessary analytic turn. It also aligns with Robbie Shilliam's (2011) critique of modernity's erasure of the sacred.  

By far one of the book’s most intriguing contributions in the current debates is that externalization is both a legacy of eurocentrism and a symptom of its decline.  By empirically detailing how externalization unfolds through – and reshapes – social relations and structures in Mauritania, this book also conceptualized this encounter’s relationship to the historic juncture of waning Eurocentrism. 

I consider After Border Externalization a much-needed contribution to the field of African migration studies, critical border studies, and postcolonial theory. Noteworthy is Moctar’s significant advancement of theory through the de-eurocentralization in the study of externalization. As someone witnessing Tunisia’s own transformation under the logic of externalization, I read this book not only as a scholar but as someone grappling with the future. After Border Externalization offers no easy answers, but it equips us to think differently. For anyone interested in how border externalization works from below, and what lies beyond its horizon, this book is essential reading. 

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