Sea Borders between Domestic and International Definitions of Spaces: Italian-Libyan Cooperation on Border Management 163

This chapter adopts a diachronic perspective to argue that the relationship between Italy and Libya has produced a specific form of sea border that entails more than the externalisation of border and migration control. Both countries have historically forged such partnerships based on their own interests and to profit from the longer-term political consequences of cooperation agreements (e.g. power vacuums and legal uncertainty). By looking at the sea border produced through Italian-Libyan partnerships since the early 2000s, the chapter investigates which actors and practices have emerged and persisted, which ones help to explain how the current sea border benefits both parties and which distinct trajectories of borderwork at sea continue to co-exist in the space of the sea.