Ex post gatekeeping and the fiction of border control: pushbacks as a technology of migration governance at the Greek–Turkish Border

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Edirne and surrounding areas along the Greek – Turkish land borders, including ethnographic observations and interviews with migrants, civil society actors and local officials, this article conceptualises pushback as a form of ex post gatekeeping: a reactive and violent mechanism intended to symbolically restore the illusion of border control. Ten years after the 2016 EU – Turkey Statement, it critically revisits Turkey’s role as gatekeeper of the EU’s external borders and a refugee rentier state by examining the bidirectional hyper-circulation and the recurrent cycle of irregularised crossings and pushbacks. The article argues that pushback practices challenge the logic of gatekeeping aimed at preventing entry ex ante and instead operate as a performative technique of migration governance that perpetuates the fiction of border control. The analysis is organised into two sections. The first documents how the persistence of a cycle of irregularised border crossings and expulsions at the Greek – Turkish border has ensured a continuous flow of funds for migration management and border control directed towards both host and potential destination countries. The second examines how hyper-circulation challenges the EU’s narrative of sealed borders and migration management, revealing a border regime characterised by contradiction, permeability and systemic human rights violations.