Study title

This ethnographic project aims to examine criminalizing and illegalizing processes targeting pro-migration activists and other citizens (e.g. volunteers, practitioners) in Morocco and France. The study investigates the competing ways in which ‘crimes of solidarity’ mobilise discourses and practices of solidarity, citizenship, and illegality in Morocco and France. The data collection examines how state repression of pro-migration activists and other ‘citizens’, who are often conflated with smugglers and accused of aiding irregular migrants, sheds light on the shifting and contested legal, moral and political boundaries between ‘irregular migrants’ and ‘citizens’. The recent focus on the figure and experience of ‘the migrant’ has enriched scholarly engagements with the construction of migrant illegality, irregular migrant political agency, and the entanglements of humanitarianism and security. Our project expands these conversations by exploring how migration politics target and affect not just migrants but also citizens. This shift is necessary in order to examine the far-reaching bordering practices and contested politics of exclusion beyond inter-state boundaries and the precarious lives of irregular migrants. We investigate how migration politics in France and Morocco are shifting the political agency and subjectivity of citizens who face (the threat of) prosecution from state authorities at the border and beyond. This has been achieved through participant observation and informal interviews with activists, artists, community leaders, NGO practitioners, funders, and other relevant professionals in Morocco and France. Themes discussed during conversations included : participants’ opinions about the politics of migration in Morocco/France; their history of activism and other engagement around migration; the motivations behind their engagement; the difficulties and obstacles they have faced in their activities and engagement over migration etc. The project...