From safe havens to death traps: the EU’s migrationexternalisation and the processual and plastic stages of genocide

Can genocide be reimagined beyond its static legal form and singular rupture? This chapter advances a threefold theoretical and empirical framework to interrogate the externalisation–genocide nexus, offering a processual, plastic, and politically charged understanding of genocide at sea. Rather than treating genocide as an extraordinary aberration, we trace how it unfolds through slow, bureaucratised, and racialised migration control regimes that externalise state functions and obscure responsibility. Genocide, we argue, is not a fixed category but a mutable assemblage, continually reconfigured through its (non-)operationalisation by shifting constellations of actors, infrastructures, and legal logics. Drawing on critical legal scholarship, criminology, and migration studies, the chapter addresses a striking conceptual silence: the reluctance to invoke genocide even where regimes of structural violence and coercive exclusion are laid bare. In tracing the entanglement of genocide and the ocean, the chapter confronts the sea not as empty expanse, but as a juridical void where bodies vanish, responsibility dissolves, and violence drifts unclaimed.