EU’s bordering norms in Libya and Lebanon: the impact of the local context

Abstract

The EU may be a porous area that need a common Integrated Border Management (IBM) system as well as several institutions, surveillance tools and politics to monitor an inter-agency cooperation and control of its external borders. In the backdrop of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), a new role has been assigned to external states bordering the eastern and southern flanks of the EU, with a progressive process of outsourcing security check on migrants thus extending the EU state borders up to the Mediterranean states, creating an EU borderland. This paper intends to raise the question of the impact of this EU external bordering process on some Arab neighbors since the outbreak of the Arab uprisings in 2011. More particularly, the research intends to focus on two types of states – Libya and Lebanon – with poor governance in order to show the limits of the implementation of IBM in such contexts. In order to highlight these, the paper delve into the borderwork of two EU or international bodies implementing IBM norms and rules to explore their relationships with the local state institutions. They both tend to show the key importance of the local context as a crucial explanatory factor of the limits of the implementation of such norms. Keywords: Integrated Border Management, EU, Libya, Lebanon, local context