Non-Arrival and Asylum: Border Externalisation, Political Disappearance and Abolitionist Ethics

In an era of war, mass displacement, and intensifying anti-refugee politics, what does it mean to say that asylum is ending? Standard diagnoses emphasise admissions numbers, narrowed eligibility criteria, or an undifferentiated lack of political will. This paper argues that these accounts miss a deeper transformation in Europe’s contemporary modalities of bordering: asylum ends when states actively disable the procedural and political conditions under which protection can be sought at all. Through border externalisation and related practices, European regimes increasingly govern mobility in ways that ensure displaced people are intercepted, diverted, contained, or removed without ever reaching a forum that is required to register, hear, and answer a protection claim. A governing logic of non-arrival, not simply exclusion, but the engineered foreclosure of claim-making capacity and political visibility. The argument develops in three steps. First, it clarifies the normative stakes by distinguishing asylum from humanitarian rescue. On the account defended here, asylum’s minimal point is not merely relief from suffering, but access to political possibility and politically meaningful procedure, a structured way to contest coercive mobility control and to demand protection as a matter of right rather than discretionary benevolence. The distinctive wrong of non-arrival is therefore not exhausted by violence at the border; it is the production of political disappearance, as people are governed as objects of border management while being denied agency and political subjectivity. Second, the paper shows how externalisation operationalises non-arrival. By shifting interception, screening, and containment into offshore, proxy, or transit arrangements, states separate effective control from reviewable responsibility. The result is procedural invisibility in which coercion is exercised but the institutional point at which it can be challenged is displaced, delayed, or dissolved. The paper concludes by defending an ethics of abolitionism under conditions of externalisation. If non-arrival is produced through political, material and political infrastructures that make protection practically unreachable, then legitimacy cannot be restored by marginal reforms to offshore sites or faster screening at a distance. What is required is the dismantling of arrangements that exercise mobility control without accessible review, and their replacement with mobility-enabling institutions: safe pathways, non-carceral reception, and procedures that are reachable wherever border power is exercised. Under these conditions, freedom of movement functions as a constraint on border governance, as when states shape and restrict cross-border options, they incur duties to secure routes through which protection can be sought without coercion, danger, or disappearance.