Mapping Liquid Boundaries: Africa, Europe, and the Limits of Mediterranean Geopolitics

By Daniel Tödt

This contribution is based on a talk presented as part of the MECAM Policy Talk 2026 and its accompanying events, focusing on “The Future of Mediterranean Relations: German and Maghrebi Perspectives on the New Pact for the Mediterranean.” The Policy Talk took place on June 25, 2026, in Berlin.

The Mediterranean frame does not simply connect regions; it also shapes which relations are foregrounded and organised. I approach this question from a perspective that brings together my current work at the German Africa Foundation, where I cover North and Central Africa, and earlier research on the historical connections between Africa and the Mediterranean and the disciplinary boundaries that have often obscured them.ⁱ As a platform connecting political, diplomatic, academic and civil-society perspectives on Africa, the Foundation regularly works across regional boundaries that are often treated separately. Together, these professional and scholarly perspectives have encouraged me to pay closer attention to links that can become less visible between institutional and disciplinary categories.

This article develops an argument presented at the MECAM Policy Talk 2026 and builds on discussions initiated at the 2025 MECAM Policy Talk, where a public roundtable hosted in partnership with the German Africa Foundation explored how the Maghreb–Sahel divide might be bridged in policy and research. The resulting takeaways on this blog highlighted the institutional separation of the two regions despite their deep historical, political, social, economic and environmental interconnections.ⁱⁱ A subsequent contribution examined the fragmented landscape of cooperation between North Africa and the Sahel.ⁱⁱⁱ

Let’s begin with the map itself. How do we imagine the Mediterranean? What kind of Africa becomes visible within that imagination ‒ and what remains outside the frame? The question is not only where the Mediterranean frame ends, but also around which centre it arranges the connections it brings into view.

European policy often describes North Africa and the Maghreb as Europe’s Southern Neighbourhood, as Mediterranean partners, or as security, energy and mobility corridors. These descriptions reflect real forms of cooperation and political interest, but they also create a particular field of vision. Within such framings, the region’s place within Africa can become less visible: centuries of Saharan mobility, Black North African histories, long-standing intra-African connections, and contemporary African lives in cities such as Casablanca, Tripoli, Tunis or Algiers.

Mediterranean cooperation is necessary, but it should not become the only frame. Building on MECAM’s understanding of the Maghreb as an “autonomous region in motion”, the region can be seen as shaped by its own dynamics and by its connections with Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the wider world.^iv

By “map”, I mean not only a visual representation, but the categories, partnerships, routes and institutional files through which some connections become visible, fundable and governable while others recede.^v This is why I distinguish between geopolitics in the Mediterranean ‒ the actors, infrastructures and conflicts operating across the region ‒ and the geopolitics of the Mediterranean: the political production of the region itself, its boundaries, centres and connections.^vi

A North African state may simultaneously appear as an energy partner, a migration partner, an African actor, a security partner and a human-rights concern, while these dimensions are often discussed separately. Policy coherence therefore also depends on whether institutional categories allow such connections to remain visible.

How Scholarship Divided Africa and the Mediterranean

The same logic of regional separation is deeply embedded in area studies. Scholarship on Africa has often treated the Maghreb as peripheral or stopped at the Sahara, while Mediterranean history has included North Africa but left connections extending further into the continent at the margins. The modern histories of Africa and the Mediterranean are more interconnected than their disconnected historiographies suggest. The historical formation of area studies not only defined new academic and geopolitical regions; it also contributed to placing long-established human connections in separate fields of study.^vii

The Sahara could consequently appear primarily as a boundary rather than as a historical space of mobility, exchange and political formation. This division is not merely conceptual. It also shapes language training, archival and bibliographical practices, academic networks and the cases that are brought into comparison.^viii

Yet the Maghreb’s African dimension does not stand apart from its Amazigh, Arab, Jewish, Islamic, Mediterranean and Saharan histories. These histories overlap, while the placement of the Maghreb between “Africa” and the “Middle East” is itself the product of a longer history of geographical classification and political imagination rather than a self-evident division of space.^ix

Efforts to introduce “views from the South” have helped challenge the traditional European orientation of Mediterranean history. But the meaning of the South depends on the point of observation: seen from West Africa or the Sahel, a perspective from the Southern Mediterranean shore may still be a view from the north.^x This tension is already visible in Braudel’s expansive conception of the Mediterranean. His Mediterranean extended far beyond the coastline and included northern parts of Africa, yet many African actors and trans-Saharan connections remained at the margins of the frame.^xi

These historiographical divisions matter beyond scholarship. In European debates, Black North African histories and people from elsewhere on the continent often become visible mainly through migration. Contemporary movement can then appear as a recent crisis detached from longer histories of diaspora, travel, expulsion and unequal access to mobility. Broader histories of belonging and exchange consequently recede behind the categories of transit and border management, while Africa appears primarily as a route, market or resource base rather than as a space of political projects, knowledge production and regional agency.

Reading the Pact as a Map

The European Union’s Pact for the Mediterranean illustrates how such maps operate in practice. It can be read not only as a policy instrument, but also as an arrangement of the actors, routes and policy fields brought together within a common framework.^xii

Although initially focused on the Southern Mediterranean, the Pact is not conceived as geographically closed. It also envisages cooperation with Gulf partners, neighbouring countries and regional organisations such as the African Union. Yet its institutional centre remains the EU and its Southern Mediterranean partners, while other actors tend to enter through particular fields such as investment, infrastructure, security and migration. This makes the framework more open without necessarily giving other regional perspectives equal influence over the agenda.

Its internal organisation also distinguishes between different forms of mobility. Youth exchange, education, skills and legal mobility appear primarily as opportunities, while migration, return and border management are addressed more strongly through categories of security and control. This is not a comprehensive assessment of the Pact, but it shows how institutional categories shape which forms of movement are framed as desirable, governable or risky.

Competing Maps of the Maghreb

Europe, however, is not the only mapmaker. Maghrebi states position themselves within African, Atlantic, Sahelian, Arab and global spaces, while the African Union, ECOWAS and other regional organisations pursue priorities of their own. These alternative maps are themselves political, selective and contested; they are not necessarily more inclusive simply because they are not organised around a European centre.

Morocco makes this particularly clear. From Berlin or Brussels, it is usually discussed as a Mediterranean and energy partner and as a key actor in European migration policy. From Dakar or Abidjan, by contrast, it may also appear as an African destination ‒ a place of work, study, business and family life.

The more revealing question is whether Morocco understands itself primarily as a bridge to the rest of the continent or as politically and socially embedded within it. Recent debates in Jeune Afrique point to precisely this tension between Morocco’s diplomatic and economic orientation towards the continent and the more difficult question of how African belonging is understood and lived within Moroccan society.^xiii

Morocco’s return to the African Union in 2017 was framed as a continental homecoming, making African belonging central to its diplomatic and economic self-positioning. Yet diplomatic positioning does not settle the question of how that belonging is lived ‒ or who is included in it.

Morocco’s Atlantic Initiative for landlocked Sahel states and the Nigeria–Morocco Atlantic African Gas Pipeline project position it within a geopolitical space linking the Sahel, Atlantic Africa and wider markets. Within Moroccan society, Black Moroccan histories and the experiences of people from other parts of the continent complicate this official narrative: economic and educational opportunities coexist with precarious legal conditions, racism and unequal access to protection.

Morocco’s map-making is also contested. Western Sahara remains on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories and on the agenda of its decolonisation bodies.^xiv Opposing Moroccan and Algerian positions on its status form a major fault line within the Maghreb.

In 2020, the normalisation of Moroccan–Israeli relations was accompanied by US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. The parallel announcements linked Morocco’s diplomatic opening towards Israel to its effort to secure international recognition of its territorial claim on the Atlantic edge of the Sahara.

Where Morocco increasingly mobilises an Atlantic and West African geography, Algeria more often projects a continental, Saharan and anti-colonial one. Both spatial projects extend beyond the Mediterranean, but they organise regional space around different histories, diplomatic traditions and political claims. The rivalry therefore produces not only competing maps, but also the continued weakness of the Maghreb as a shared political and economic space.^xv

In the Sahel, Algeria presents itself as an advocate of African-led mediation, state sovereignty and non-interference. Its involvement in successive negotiations concerning Mali forms an important part of this self-positioning, even as recent political changes in the Sahel have placed Algeria’s influence and mediation model under pressure.

This continental positioning is also visible in Algeria’s role in the African Union’s debate on reparatory justice. The International Conference on Crimes of Colonialism in Africa, hosted in Algiers in 2025, connected Algeria’s own history of anti-colonial struggle with broader African claims for recognition, historical justice and reparations. Colonial history thus remains part of how Algeria defines both its African position and the terms of its relations with Europe.

From a European perspective, however, Algeria often appears primarily through the map of Mediterranean energy interdependence. Gas pipelines and emerging hydrogen corridors connect it directly to European markets, but this energy map captures only one dimension of its regional positioning.

Taken together, the Moroccan and Algerian cases show that moving beyond a European Mediterranean map does not produce a single African alternative, but several competing spatial projects.

Where Policy Fields Collide

Libya reveals another limit of the Mediterranean frame. The overthrow of the Gaddafi regime did not create the Sahel’s political and security crises; many of the region’s structural challenges predated 2011. But the subsequent fragmentation of state authority intensified existing fragilities, as armed fighters returned from Libya and weapons circulated into the Sahel. Libya therefore shows how difficult it is to separate Mediterranean intervention, Sahelian security and African mobility into distinct policy fields.

The Tunisian case brings us back to the broader tension between European cooperation, mobility and racialised exclusion. The country is both an important partner in European migration policy and a society with its own Black histories and communities. Since 2023, official rhetoric has portrayed irregular migration from countries south of the Sahara as a demographic threat, intensifying existing patterns of anti-Black discrimination and insecurity.^xvi

European migration cooperation cannot in itself explain domestic racism. But border externalisation can interact with and reinforce existing racialised hierarchies. What institutions describe as migration cooperation may therefore be experienced by migrants, refugees and Black Tunisians as insecurity and exclusion. Their treatment is part of the political reality of the partnership, not a secondary aspect of migration policy.^xvii

Beyond Tunisia, the same tension runs through mobility policy more broadly. In the Pact, mobility appears through education, youth exchange and skills, but also through border management, return and readmission. Some forms of movement are framed as opportunities, others as risks to be controlled. Meanwhile, the quieter circulation of students, workers, families and diasporic networks often disappears between these categories.

Sharing the Map-Making

The problem is not simply that European policy knows too little about Africa. More broadly, Western perspectives often continue to function as the implicit centre of international politics.^xviii In the Mediterranean context, this Western centring becomes visible in the categories, corridors and partnership formats through which Africa enters European policy.

The question of perspective also gives a more demanding meaning to the German phrase Partnerschaft auf Augenhöhe ‒ partnership at eye level, often translated as partnership on equal footing ‒ which remains common in German development cooperation. At the German Africa Foundation, the phrase is viewed critically: if equality has to be asserted so explicitly, it is clearly not yet a lived reality.

The aspiration behind it involves more than how partners look at one another. It also entails understanding where partners are looking from, what they are looking towards, and which histories shape their perspectives. This does not remove conflicts of interest or guarantee agreement, but it can make both cooperation and disagreement more informed.

This leaves three questions.

When Mediterranean policy connects North Africa with the Gulf, the Sahel or Atlantic Africa, who defines these connections? Do other regional perspectives reshape the agenda, or merely extend a Euro-Mediterranean frame?

How can African, Sahelian, diasporic and Black North African perspectives shape knowledge and policy, rather than remain objects of research, governance or migration management?

And how can energy, mobility, security and rights be addressed together without denying the tensions between them?

The limit of Mediterranean geopolitics is perhaps not that it has no view beyond the sea. Increasingly, it does. The deeper limit is that it may still arrange these wider connections around a European centre. A genuinely multiperspectival conversation begins when we see those connections ‒ and become willing to share the map-making.

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About the author

Daniel Tödt is Programme Officer for Central and North Africa at the German Africa Foundation. He is a historian specialising in the colonial and contemporary history of Africa and in transregional connections between Africa, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Previously, he taught African studies and global history at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was a DAAD PRIME Fellow at the University of Konstanz and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Aix-en-Provence.

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i Daniel Tödt, “Black Routes: Charting Migration’s Turbulent Mediterranean Histories,” in: The Sociological Review Magazine, 8 October 2024, DOI: 10.51428/tsr.qbtx4477.

ii Clara-Auguste Süß, André Bank and Julius Dihstelhoff, “Bridging the Maghreb-Sahel Divide in Policy and Research: Take-aways from the MECAM Policy Talk 2025,” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 28.08.2025, DOI: 10.58079/14it6.

iii Ornella Moderan, “Sahel–North Africa Relations: Addressing Common Threats in a Fragmented Cooperation Landscape,” in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 04.11.2025, DOI: 10.58079/1539p.

iv Julius Dihstelhoff, Rachid Ouaissa and Thomas Richter, Reimagining the Maghreb: Navigating an Autonomous Region in Motion, MECAM Papers, No. 7, 2024, DOI: 10.25673/116447.

v Andrea Fischer-Tahir and Steffen Wippel, “Transregionale Verflechtungen der MENA-Region: Konzeptionelle und forschungspraktische Herausforderungen,” in: Steffen Wippel and Andrea Fischer-Tahir, eds., Jenseits etablierter Meta-Geographien: Der Nahe Osten und Nordafrika in transregionaler Perspektive, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2018, pp. 11–38.

vi Manuel Borutta and Fernando Esposito, “Flüssiger Kontinent: Das Mittelmeer der Moderne,” in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 49, no. 2, 2023, pp. 163–202, DOI: 10.13109/gege.2023.49.2.163.

vii See also The Mediterranean of Modernity: Global and Regional Perspectives, 6th Workshop of the DFG Research Network “Modern Mediterranean. Dynamics of a World Region,” Berlin, 4–7 October 2022, co-organised by Manuel Borutta, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi, Esther Möller and Daniel Tödt, which included the section “Connecting Mediterranean & Area Studies”.

viii Ray A. Kea, “The Mediterranean and Africa,” in: Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, eds., A Companion to Mediterranean History, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014, pp. 425–440, DOI: 10.1002/9781118519356.ch27.

ix Abdelmajid Hannoum, The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

x Judith E. Tucker, ed., The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South, Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.

xi Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2 vols., Paris: Armand Colin, 1966.

xii European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, The Pact for the Mediterranean: One Sea, One Pact, One Future, Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, JOIN(2025) 26 final, Brussels, 16 October 2025.

xiii Fadwa Islah, “Le Maroc et le difficile pari de l’africanité,” in: Jeune Afrique, 2 May 2026; François Soudan, “Les Marocains sont-ils des Africains comme les autres ?,” in: Jeune Afrique, 23 May 2026.

xiv United Nations General Assembly, Question of Western Sahara: Report of the Secretary-General, A/79/229, New York, 24 July 2024.

xv Cherkaoui Roudani, “Rabat-Alger : la rivalité est-elle devenue un caprice géopolitique ?,” in: Jeune Afrique, 4 June 2026.

xvi Human Rights Watch, “Tunisia: Racist Violence Targets Black Migrants, Refugees,” 10 March 2023

xvii Rosa Maryon, “‘It’s Like a Prison’: EU Externalization, Racial Capitalism, and Anti-Black Racism in EU–Tunisia Cooperation on Migration,” in: Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, published online 23 September 2025, DOI: 10.1017/rep.2025.10020.

xviii Johannes Plagemann and Henrik Maihack, Wir sind nicht alle. Der globale Süden und die Ignoranz des Westens, Munich: C.H.Beck, 2023.

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Citation: Daniel Tödt, Mapping Liquid Boundaries: Africa, Europe, and the Limits of Mediterranean Geopolitics. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 17.09.26 from https://trafo.hypotheses.org/?p=68631

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