ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the efforts to govern the mobility of people, services, and goods into member states via off-shore border security practices as a way of analysing the evolving role of the European Union (EU) as a global geopolitical actor. It considers three recent examples of the exporting of the EU's borders beyond the traditional site of the border: attempts to deter illegal immigration via land, air, and maritime surveillance in Western and Northern Africa; the policing of EU maritime trade routes in response to the threat of piracy off the Somali coast in the Indian Ocean; and new 'virtual' border security practices involving the on-line monitoring of allegedly 'risky' individuals and groups in cyberspace. The analysis draws on the thought of Giorgio Agamben to sketch out how the global projection of the EU's borders can be theorised in terms of the concept of a generalised biopolitical border.
