During this meeting organised by the Radboud University, Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) will give a presentation on Pushbacks at European borders: a domination technology at the service of the deportation regime. The aim of the intervention consists in showing how states are making their borders thick – wide and deep – through the recourse to the law, through the use of legal norms (both their adoption and their implementation). Understood as lines, nodes or zones, borders have been widened by legal methods, in order to establish more effective control over their crossing and tighter management of people on the move. Borders understood as zones are thus often seen in opposition to borders understood as lines. Yet the latter have become thicker, with certain sections of the border becoming wider (e.g. the maritime border of the central and eastern Mediterranean, the land border between Greece and Turkey, the border between Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus). The practice of pushbacks demonstrates the thickening of borders: these are methods of removing migrants without assessing their individual situation, carried out rapidly and arbitrarily by border guards and coastguards from areas upstream or downstream of the state’s territorial contours. Such thickening of borders, both zones and lines, results in a reduction in migrants’ access to their rights, and an expansion of areas of lesser rights for migrants. Developing a Foucauldian approach of borders, it is proposed to consider pushbacks as a technology of domination, referring to Philip Pettit and Franck Lovett’s research. All mechanisms will be considered: their routines, their legalization, their implications, their significance.