Revisiting Al‐Idrissi: The Eu and the (Euro)Mediterranean Archipelago Frontier

Abstract

This contribution has three overarching objectives. First, it seeks to describe the logics of fracture and cohesion governing current geopolitical dynamics in the Mediterranean. Second, in the face of these contradictory tendencies, it proposes the notion of archipelago‐frontier as a concept for deepening our understanding of an ever more dispersed and ubiquitous geography defining the Southern border of the EU. In this light we draw on the contemporary resonances of the destabilising cartographic imagination of Al‐Idrissi (1100‐1165). And we argue that, read today, it helps us rethink the current symbolic, terminological (and hence geopolitical) abduction of the Mediterranean by the European Union, which the very term ‘Euromediterranean’ encapsulates. Finally, the paper underlines the necessity of forging new vistas on the Mediterranean engendering perspectives that are more dialogical, plurivocal and sensitive to permanent transformation, as evoked by a long‐term spatial as well as political horizon of struggle.

Beyond the “lettered border”

“…The normative vacillation in border studies becomes dangerous to the extent that the most cited and applauded texts reproduce the exclusionary, oppressive and deadly nature of contemporary geopolitical bordering, expressed most vividly by the European Union (EU)'s practice of migration policy in the Mediterranean. Here, what the Catalan geographer Xavier Ferrer-Gallardo and I have called the "spectacular borders" of the EU are made manifest in academic writing on the operations of European multilateral security organizations such as FRONTEX, whereby emphasis is placed on the thousands of deaths which have converted the Mare Nostrum into an aquatic cemetery (Ferrer-Gallardo and Kramsch, 2016). In spite of noble intentions and capacity for moral denunciation, such academic work, in addition to veering dangerously close to populist discourses on the rise across Europe, only serve to reinscribe geopolitical hierarchies between the EU and the rest of the world.…”