Moral Borderwork

Policies, Policing, and Practices of Migrant Smuggling at the EU-Morocco Border

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3948577
AutoresLinda Richter (0000-0001-8029-2880, University of Copenhagen, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen27
Número5
Páginas1430-1449
Fecha de publicación2022-10-20
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2021.1953477
OpenAlexW3192692933
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas34

In the ongoing global ‘war on migration’, no character has been more vilified than the ‘human smuggler’. Images of unscrupulous men taking advantage of innocent people flood the media and political discourse. Morocco, with its strategic geopolitical position as a main gateway between Africa and Europe, is no exception in this regard. In this article, I examine how the smuggler has come centre stage in the borderwork around the Europe–Morocco frontier. The concept of borderwork has gained traction in recent scholarship as a way of describing the complicated and rapidly changing empirical complexity of the creation and control of borders. This article further develops this notion, focusing on three intertwined aspects of the borderwork complex: policies, policing and practices of migrant smuggling. Rather than providing counter-arguments to the evil smuggler narrative (a task that has been admirably accomplished by many scholars) I here take an interest in the different intersecting forms of moral labour that go into anti-smuggling policies, local policing of migrants and practices of migrant smuggling, and make a preliminary case for the concept of moral borderwork. This concept allows us to consider how social concerns are raised, reproduced and handled in the borderwork complex. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the point of departure for this article is a particular moment in time during the summer and autumn of 2018 in Morocco, where black migrants were violently arrested and expelled in large numbers from the northern part of the country

Frontier · Geopolitics · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Migration and Exile Studies · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration