Humanitarian borders: condemned to repeat? : the case of the Spanish enclaves

Abstract

Borders have become a kind of meta-issue, capable of condensing a whole complex of fears and political concerns, including globalisation, loss of sovereignty, terrorism and irregular immigration. And Europe represents the paradigm of government policies exercised in and across borders, a government based on the exclusion and otherness of the migrants, in which subjects are framed according to their recognised capacity to move and live, to be and to enter into EUrope. After the long summer of migration of 2015, a new way of governing migration emerged, the humanitarian governance, in which care and control, protection and securitisation are both two sides of the same logic. In this thesis, we look at the military-humanitarian nature deployed at the Spanish-Moroccan border in Ceuta and Melilla and the birth of a “humanitarian border” to show the complex relationship of forces and contestation between control strategies and technologies and care and assistance practices. Thus, paradoxically, through the provision of humanitarianism, the systemic violence at the border is being perpetuated.