This article explores an increasingly significant trend in crime and mobility control that has received scant criminological attention: border externalization, specifically scrutinizing land border security-building by international actors in West Africa. Going beyond the usual focus on migration in border studies, it develops a criminologically grounded theorization of the border as a political technology of crime control and its relationship to the state. This is done by arguing that borders, theorized as ‘penal transplants’ embodying specific (western) visions of state, political power, social control/order and territoriality, are transformed and often distorted when performed in ‘heterarchical’ contexts in the global South. Further, empirically based concepts from ‘the periphery’ are suggested to enrich border criminology, broadening its geographical scope and spatial awareness.

本文探讨了犯罪和流动控制方面日益重要的趋势，这一趋势在犯罪学上很少受到关注：边界外化，特别是对西非国际行为者对建立土地边界安全的审查。它超越了通常在边界研究中对移民的关注，发展了一种基于犯罪学的边界理论，将其作为犯罪控制及其与国家关系的政治技术。这是通过论证将边界理论化为体现国家，政治权力，社会控制/秩序和领土性的（西方）特定（西方）构想的“笔下的移民”而实现的，并且在全球南方的“等级制”环境中执行时，边界经常被扭曲。此外，建议从“外围”中基于经验的概念来丰富边界犯罪学，