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The article discusses the language of border externalisation processes by examining the knowledge that stands as the basis of the EU–Turkey deal and reports on its implementation, placing them in the context of the transformation of the EU border regime. It is the result of a study addressing the language and key concepts that organise border externalisation and its geographic and biopolitical episteme. Our interest lies in the production of knowledge emerging from the EU–Turkey deal, and its effects on both the mainstream discourse on migration and the legitimation and acceptance of violent border management practices. To do this, we offer an interpretation of the textual materials composing the deal as promoting a discourse on migrants that strictly categorises territories and peoples, and establishes geographies of control and hierarchies of deserving and undeserving subjects, by asserting new forms of biopolitical control and care over their bodies. The presentation of research results combines the extraction of keywords and sentences from the documents analysed with an interpretation of their epistemic strength in producing and promoting specific biased Eurocentric narratives on migrants and migration. At the core of the agreement's texts we find the category of the 'deserving migrant' as increasingly defining and circumscribing mobility, and realised in the one-for-one swap policy.

A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element unpacks the counter-intuitive inclination towards institutional cooperation in populist foreign policy and discusses its implications for the LIO. Straddling Western and non-Western contexts, it compares the regional cooperation strategies of populist leaders from three continents: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The study identifies an emerging populist 'script' of regional cooperation based on notions of popular sovereignty. By embedding regional cooperation in their political strategies, populist leaders are able to contest the LIO and established international organisations without having to revert to unilateral nationalism.

Abstract
There is a widespread belief among scholars and policy-makers that populism has fuelled a unilateralist backlash because of its emphasis on nationalism, popular sovereignty and identity politics. Although a few populist governments have indeed withdrawn from some international institutions, this 'disengagement hypothesis' needs to be scrutinized and unpacked. In this article, we develop a framework that distinguishes between four types of institutional disengagement—criticism, obstruction, extortion and exit—and show that populist governments use them in a fluid and tactical way to navigate between the radical and pragmatic imperatives of populist politics. Our comparative case-study of the Hungarian executive under Viktor Orbán (since 2010) and the Trump administration in the US (2017–2021) demonstrates that both governments have frequently used criticism, obstruction and extortion to disengage from international institutions but have only rarely exited from them. The article thus deepens our understanding of the impact of populism on both individual institutions and the multilateral order more broadly, and helps policy-makers develop strategies to counter the adverse effects of populism.