Deaths, Borders, and the Exception: Humanitarianism at the Spanish–Moroccan Border

Abstract

This essay questions the rise of border humanitarianism in the North-Eastern Moroccan borderlands. The increasing presence of humanitarian organizations in contexts marked by border violence has raised the attention of a number of critical migration scholars. Observers, however, have failed to problematize the presence of humanitarian activities, traditionally connected to emergency contexts, in sites integrated in the “routinary” regulation of mobility. Building on 8 months of fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017, the article addresses this gap, taking the working of border humanitarianism as a vantage point to reflect on the relation of borders to the exception, on the role of violence in border maintenance and, ultimately, on the politics of life and death at the frontier. Drawing on the work of Salter and Vaughan Williams on exceptionalism and biopolitics at the border, the article makes two points. First, I argue that the ordinary functioning of the Spanish–Moroccan border is founded on the bestialization and devaluation of Black lives, often to the point of death. Second, I contend that the integration of the “exception” in border normalcy activates, challenges, and endlessly reproduces the need for emergency interventions. In this dystopian framework, humanitarianism becomes a tool for the ordinary maintenance of migrants’ degraded life, transformed by the border into a less-than-citizen, less-than-human form of existence.