Border Internalization and the Future of Asylum in Europe

This paper examines the contemporary transformation of asylum in Europe through the process of border internalization. While the externalization of migration control—through offshore processing, migration agreements with third countries, and extraterritorial interception—has been widely analyzed as a displacement of asylum obligations beyond territorial borders while formally preserving states‘ commitments under international law, this paper focuses on the internal dynamics accompanying these developments. Technologies of border control, surveillance, and often of disenfranchisement and violence, diffuse inward, relocating border functions deep within national territories. Through dispersed controls, administrative barriers, and conditional access to social rights, border internalization governs asylum seekers long after entry and enables the expansion of these technologies to broader segments of society. The paper argues that the current crisis of asylum is not merely the result of restrictive policies, but of a structural reconfiguration of where, how, and by whom borders are enacted. It further asks what these shifts reveal about the societies that implement them, emphasizing that borders and border practices are constitutive of the political “inside”. Drawing on the work of Étienne Balibar, the paper conceptualizes these dynamics as a process of “double internalization”, referring both to the legal-infrastructural internalization of border control and to internalization as a process of subjectivation, through which border practices become embedded in social order, political rationalities, and everyday experience. The paper concludes by reflecting on the normative implications of these developments for refugee protection and for liberal democratic societies in which the violence of the border is increasingly openly enacted.