TY - JOUR

T1 - Moral Borderwork

T2 - Policies, Policing, and Practices of Migrant Smuggling at the EU-Morocca Border

AU - Richter, Line

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - ANTI-POLICY

KW - MIGRATION

KW - WAR

U2 - 10.1080/14650045.2021.1953477

DO - 10.1080/14650045.2021.1953477

M3 - Journal article

VL - 27

SP - 1430

EP - 1449

JO - Geopolitics

JF - Geopolitics

SN - 1465-0045

IS - 5

ER -