Abstract
Taking the perspective of the Central and West African women blocked at the Moroccan-Spanish border, reveals how EU policies, in exporting their anti-migrant war to African countries, seem to have reinforced a continuum of male dominance: by creating, along the migratory route, a succession of spaces where African women must resist and/or succumb to multiple relations of power and domination in order to be able to cross the securitized borders, controlled by a plurality of actors but often all men. Breaking with binary and essentialist views that often present them as merely passive subjects of their migration, the women interviewed disclose hidden mechanisms and effects of the externalization of EU migration control policies on the bodies and lives of those who fight for their freedom of movement. Based on 30-months of ethnographic research in Morocco and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, this article aims to show how EU border externalization provokes racialized and gendered vulnerabilization of people seeking mobility and notably reinforces gender-based violence against migrant women. There are several levels of violence against women seeking mobility at borders, we will focus on two: violence emanating from certain men who are part of the organization of the crossing, and violence exerted by the States policing the border. Both of these cases illustrate the interaction between mobility control policies and control over women’s bodies as an effect of border externalization.
Highlights
In 2004, in the first Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) report on the issue of the “Sub-Saharan” migrants at the Moroccan-Spanish border, Anne-Sophie Wender of La Cimade wrote: “The three informal camps visited are made up of a population that is overwhelmingly male
An enduring tendency can be identified on every level – States, local, micro-local – to take advantage of certain women’s presence and to control their mobility and sexuality
It seems clear that the externalisation of EU borders in Africa worsens the violence perpetrated against women seeking mobility throughout the migration process because it creates a continuum of spaces where black women have to resist and/or give in to relations of power of gender, race and class in order to cross securitized borders
Summary
In 2004, in the first Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) report on the issue of the “Sub-Saharan” migrants at the Moroccan-Spanish border, Anne-Sophie Wender of La Cimade wrote: “The three informal camps visited are made up of a population that is overwhelmingly male. Except for two very young babies (...) we did not meet any children in the camps” (Cimade, 2004, p.13). In June 2017, during my last field observation in the same region of Nador, near Melilla, my conclusions were different: the number of women, especially pregnant women, babies and children was visually striking, clearly offsetting the male presence, but not equal to it. The feminization of this population is not new. Much research has been conducted on “Sub-Saharan” migration in Morocco
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