Beyond presentism in border externalization studies: Upcycled spatio-cultural geographies of imperial times

• Border externalization has unexplored colonial-imperial trajectories. • Inflecting border studies through post and decolonial approaches can rectify dehistoricization. • Decentering and provincialization of analyses can counter Eurocentric epistemological erasures. • EU self-representation as a decolonial power is paradoxical and sidesteps Member States colonial pasts. • Methodological presentism continues to shape externalization policy-making as well as research. This Special Issue Introduction signals how post, decolonial and historical gazes enhance studies of border externalization efforts by European Union (EU) institutions and Member States in African countries. Research has only begun to acknowledge how economic, political and social geographies of extraterritorial migration management stretch back in time connecting to longer histories of empire. Predominantly, externalization studies have remained thoroughly embedded in a Eurocentric post-Cold War time frame where externalization was conceptualized as the spatial outgrowth of the European Union yielding a de-historicized spatiality, epistemology and narratives. This SI highlights the “methodological presentism” hitherto at work in border externalization research, and poses ways of challenging the associated epistemological boundaries. This introduction, and the themed articles therein, de-centre dominant spatio-temporal assumptions in border externalization research by applying a historical gaze on border practices through postcolonial and decolonial theory. We argue that future research on externalisation, and on the role of borders more broadly, would benefit from this approach, situating what seems an innovative spatial and political practice in a longer, and more instructive, timeframe.