Tunisia’s multiple roles as a gatekeeper of (Im)mobility: the case of the EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding

This article critically revisits Tunisia’s role as a gatekeeper of the European Union’s southern borders through an in-depth analysis of the 2023 EU – Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on migration. It develops an analytical framework of five gatekeeping roles – containment, filtering, broker, (in)humanitarian, and ambivalently reluctant – to capture the multiple and shifting ways in which Tunisia engages with EU externalization. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews conducted in Tunisia between October and December 2023, the article argues that Tunisia performs overlapping and often contradictory functions that challenge conventional understandings of delegated border control. The analysis demonstrates how Tunisian authorities combine distinct forms of gatekeeping: acting as a containment hub for transit migrants; as a filtering gatekeeper governing mobility through differentiated enforcement across migrant groups; as a broker leveraging migration control to extract financial resources and political concessions; as an (in)humanitarian gatekeeper producing spaces of abandonment and unequal exposure to harm; and as a reluctant and ambivalent partner engaging through partial compliance and strategic ambiguity. By foregrounding how these logics coexist within a single empirical case, the article shows that EU externalization produces selective, uneven, and contested forms of migration governance rather than uniform control.