Fencing in the South: : The Strait of Gibraltar as a Paradigm of the New Border Regime in the Mediterranean

Over the last years the Mediterranean has turned into one of the main sites of implementation of the new European ‘border regime’. The manufacture of the new ‘southern frontier’ in Europe is shaping economic, social and political processes in new ways for the area. Through the ethnography of the transformations in the social and physical landscape around the Strait of Gibraltar (particularly at the Moroccan-Spanish border), this contribution puts forward a reflection upon the multiple levels of action of the contemporary border. Building on the debate on the new European ‘border regime’ and its fallouts, I propose a framework to analyse the different devices (legislative, bureaucratic, securitarian and conceptual) that compose the ‘border apparatus’ and how they are functioning in the area of Gibraltar. My aim is to give an anthropological contribution to reflect on the ways the Mediterranean is currently being set up as a new borderland, but also to propose a framework to study bordering processes in other sites.