Living and dying in transit: Violence, bodies and survival in the Tunisian borderlands

This dissertation explores how life and death in transit unfold within the Tunisian borderlands through a bottom-up, gendered lens. Drawing on anthropological and geographical scholarship on violence, alongside feminist geopolitics, this study examines how border externalization materializes on migrant bodies and in transit spaces, bridging the intimate, local, national and global.

To trace violence across scales, sites and bodies, the study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across four different sites in Tunisia: Bhar Lazreg, Medénine, Sfax and Zarzis. The fieldwork involved more than 150 in-depth interviews and participant observations with a diverse range of participants including; migrants, Tunisian fishermen, smugglers, cemetery workers, gravediggers, forensic doctors, the coastguard, EU diplomats, Tunisian civil society, politicians, and international humanitarian actors.

In conclusion, the study shows how the ripple effects of European border externalization policies extend far beyond physical borders, casting long shadows into neighbourhoods, homes and bodies in Tunisia, leading to forms of violence and suffering that are hidden. The study argues that this violence is not incidental but structurally embedded and produced, being designed into the very architecture of migration management and enforced through political and material infrastructures. It uncovers the complex entanglement of violence, gender and space in transit, as well as the intertwined processes of life and death within the EU's extended borderlands.

The study provides several contributions, both theoretical and empirical, by suggesting new understandings of transit and concepts to capture the effects of externalization, as well as new insights into Europe's expanding borders in North Africa, the human consequences and the everyday strategies of survival that emerge in response.