This dissertation explores life and death in transit within the Tunisian borderlands, offering a bottom-up, gendered lens on European border externalisation. Situated along the central Mediterranean route, Tunisia has become a key “transit country” in recent years, placing it at the heart of European migration policy. As a result, it has evolved into a crucial laboratory for the EU’s externalisation strategies, where border control is outsourced, tested, and enforced far from European territory.

Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork across four sites; Bhar Lazreg, Medenine, Sfax, and Zarzis, and drawing on hundreds of interviews with migrants, smugglers, gravediggers, forensic doctors, coastguards, fishermen, and diplomats, this dissertation traces how the ripple effects of externalisation shape everyday life in the borderlands. It shows how people navigate a system that produces harm not by accident, but by design, where violence is structurally embedded in the very architecture of migration management and enforced through political and material infrastructures.

Theoretically, empirically and methodologically, the dissertation contributes new understandings of transit and introduces concepts to grasp the effects of externalisation. It provides new insights into the EU’s expanding borders into North Africa, the human consequences of these policies, and the everyday strategies of survival, navigation, and resistance that emerge in response.

Ultimately, the study calls for a critical rethinking of how migration is governed. As restrictive border regimes expand, so too do their human, social, and environmental costs. By centering lived experiences in Tunisia’s borderlands, this research offers not only a regional analysis but also a reflection of broader global dynamics, and a call to imagine more just and humane futures of mobility.