The Central Mediterranean Buffer as a Policy Ecosystem. European Maritime Border Enforcement between Humanitarianism and Externalization

Existing scholarship has largely conceptualized the European Union’s increasingly restrictive approach to migration by leveraging the concept of “Fortress Europe”. The fortress metaphor, however, is more applicable to land boundaries than maritime border regions, which are buffer zones where states’ sovereign claims are often blurred and overlapping. Moreover, maritime border enforcement is a policy ecosystem featuring a tight interplay between a variety of public and private actors, ranging from EU agencies to member states’ security and third countries’ security forces, shipping companies and non-governmental organizations. Drawing on complexity theory, we conceptualize the maritime buffer zone off the coast of Libya as a policy ecosystem, analyzing its transformation between 2014 and 2024. We leverage quantitative and qualitative evidence to show that the maritime border enforcement policy ecosystem in the Central Mediterranean has increasingly shifted its focus from rescue operations to externalization. As a result, third countries’ security forces returning migrants to African coasts have become central, while actors with a humanitarian agenda like non-governmental organizations have been increasingly marginalized.