EUrope’s changing territory: the new pact on migration and asylum, externalization, and the common European asylum system

Recent years have marked a turning point for the externalization of border and migration control within the EU. Italy’s new policy of extraterritorial detention in Albania, together with the legislative proposal to establish return hubs in third countries, signal a qualitative shift from previous practices. EU Member States are no longer content with relying on bilateral partnerships to outsource border control to non-European countries. Instead, the new phase entails the incorporation of externalization strategies directly into the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). This transition, however, threatens the stability of the CEAS’ traditional territorial architecture. The emerging strategies are grounded in a conception of territory that departs from its conventional Westphalian definition, generating legal and political frictions when integrated into the CEAS. Such tensions are visible in the ongoing political debates and legal challenges surrounding the new measures. The article approaches these developments as a geographic problem, focusing on the tension between the contrasting definitions of territory currently competing across the CEAS’ legal framework. In doing so, it engages with recent geographic scholarship on externalization, highlighting the growing instability of the territorial order underpinning both the CEAS and the EU, and its difficulty in accommodating externalization policies without generating internal contradictions.