Networks Across Borders, Bodies at the Border: Knowledge Mobility and Physical Immobility in EU-Mediterranean governance

This paper examines practices and discourses of de-bordering and bordering across the Mediterranean region through the lenses of border studies and critical security studies. It adapts the concept of “de-bordering solidarity” (Ambrosini, 2021) to the realm of knowledge and intercultural exchange, treating these exchanges as enablers of selective legal mobility. This also serves as a decentring approach to EU foreign policy (Keukeleire and Lecocq, 2025), by focusing on the Mediterranean region and the practices of actors engaged in cross-country exchange. Key drivers of de-bordering practices are non-state actors – non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, and academia – active in knowledge and intercultural exchange across Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean. These actors facilitate professional engagement, transnational connections, and sustained interaction across the region. In contrast, bordering practices implemented by state actors and the EU often reinforce physical immobility. The resulting dichotomy between intergovernmental policies and non-state exchange initiatives generates mobility of knowledge, discourses, and practices while – most of the time – reproducing physical immobility through visa regimes and barriers to movement. This underscores the need to examine how different policy instruments interact in shaping migration and mobility. Most EU instruments for externalizing migration governance stand in tension with EU-funded programmes that promote knowledge and intercultural exchange. Against this backdrop, the paper addresses the following research questions: How do EU policy instruments balance immobility with selected mobility? How do NGOs, CSOs, and academia enable professionals to engage in virtual and/or physical exchange? And can these practices ultimately reshape EU approaches to migration governance and immobility? The study draws on oral and written interviews, document analysis, online focus groups with selected non-state actors active in knowledge and intercultural exchange across the Mediterranean – particularly in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, Italy, France, and Spain – and funded by EU programmes. The findings show that while knowledge-exchange programmes create durable transnational networks and professional mobility, they simultaneously legitimize and coexist with restrictive migration regimes. Practices of “de-bordering solidarity” implemented by non-state actors engaged in knowledge and intercultural exchange are effective on the ground; however, their advocacy power remains limited when it comes to influencing EU migration governance.