Border Imperialism in the Maghreb Violence, Exploitation, Accumulation and Resistance

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45 minutes read

Militarised borders are colonial constructs and their fortification in the Maghreb region serves a Western imperialist agenda. Many of the borders that demarcate African countries today owe their origins to illegal land grabs and colonisation in the late nineteenth century by various western European states. Our new research examines the historical roots and political economy of border-making and border violence in the Mediterranean and countries across North Africa, examining the legal and institutional frameworks of four countries in the Maghreb – Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. The report concludes by looking at the forms of resistance that have emerged to border imperialism, some of which draw on the ethos of earlier anti-colonial, pan-African, and Third Worldist struggles to imagine and practise community beyond an imperialist-capitalist order.

Border imperialism in the Maghreb

About border imperialism in the maghreb

Publication type
Report

Authors

Authors

Corinna Mullin

Summary

Barely a week goes by without news of yet another boat capsizing in the Mediterranean as migrants attempt to reach Europe, with each tally of lives lost seeming to be higher than the last. Early December 2024 brought horrific reports of an 11-year-old girl from Sierra Leone who was found floating in the Mediterranean Sea off Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa; the only survivor of a shipwrecked boat carrying 45 people that had departed from the port of Sfax in Tunisia.  She had floated in the sea for three days using innertubes inflated with air from a lifejacket before being rescued by a sailboat. The New Year brought news of at least 27 people who died in two shipwrecks off the coast of Tunisia. One of the dead was a newborn baby. With the zionist-imperialist assault on Syria ramping up and a significant number of right-wing European politicians calling for Syrian refugees to be repatriated, we can expect to see an increase in the number of Syrians dying at sea in the coming months. While the loss of life on such a scale is often described as ‘tragic’, this fails to capture the deliberate and structured nature of the racist anti-migrant violence prevailing in the Mediterranean. This violence has resulted in a huge death toll, with more than 2,200 people dead or missing in 2024 alone. Since 2014, at least 31,178 people have drowned or gone missing in one of the world’s most perilous migrant routes . Far less documented are the deaths of people crossing the Sahara, presumed to be double those that have occurred at sea.

Legal and humanitarian approaches to explaining these deaths often adopt a human rights framework to the Mediterranean border regime, focusing on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers under international law. More critical approaches shed light on the racialised dimension of border violence, emphasising the euro-centrism embedded in the ideological framework that shapes most Western migration policies and discourses. Both approaches tend to overlook the racialised and hierarchical social relations that underpin the governance of the Mediterranean between capitalist-imperialist core states and institutions, such as the European Union (EU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States African Command (AFRICOM) on the one hand, and peripheral states across North Africa, such as Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia on the other. These social relations are in turn determined by the core-periphery structural context, shaped by colonial legacies and maintained by imperialist economic and military interventions, which undermine the sovereignty of countries across the Maghreb as well as other parts of Africa and the global South/Global Majority. One feature of limited sovereignty is the inability of states to determine their own border policies in ways that bolster rather than undermine sovereignty, solidarity and national liberation.

The Mediterranean has sometimes been referred to as an ‘empty’ space, which obscures the active participation of numerous European and other neo-colonial/imperialist actors and their role in militarising the Mediterranean as well as creating the very material conditions that have led to accelerated migration across the region.  The racist underpinnings of EU policies can be seen in their shifting approach to Search and Rescue Missions (SARs) in the Mediterranean. Over the 2011–2012 period, during the ‘Arab uprisings’ against western-backed governments in Egypt and Tunisia, followed by the NATO-led intervention in Libya, EU policymakers promoted SARs in the central and western Mediterranean. These missions suited them when the EU could cast itself as civilised Europe saving people fleeing from chaos. The shift occurred in 2013, when the EU opted to criminalise and demonise racialised migrants crossing the Mediterranean. As detailed in a 2021 report, Frontex began to refer ‘to sea migration as a cross-border crime for the first time…present[ing] border control as its solution’ only in 2013. In a speech made at the European Commission in May 2023, David Yambio, the Spokesperson for Refugees in Libya, highlighted the hypocrisy of Western states—specifically EU member states and the US—in creating the conditions for the ‘enslavement, torture, and murder of people seeking safety’ from wars for which those very same actors bear responsibility.

In addition to climate breakdown, land and resource grabs, as well as imperialist wars, the neoliberal restructuring of African economies imposed by the international financial institutions (IFIs) as part of the imperialist core’s counter-revolution against Global Majority decolonisation is designed to ensure the external orientation of African economies, unequal exchange, and debt dependency. Unsurprisingly, countries that faced structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) as a condition for obtaining loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have the highest share of their population emigrating ‘to work in low wage sectors: agriculture, construction, manufacturing, care services, logistics, transportation, and the sprouting gig economy’. This, coupled with militarisation, including Western military interventions, the construction of military bases, and the provision of training and arms often used to quell popular dissent, shape the conditions of racialised vulnerability and perpetual precarity under which states manage both the ‘immobility and mobility’ of African workers, an important source of periphery-core wealth transfer.

This report uses the concepts of ‘capitalist racism’, neo-colonialism, imperialism and core-periphery relations to offer a comprehensive analysis of the structures, overlapping strategies, ideological frameworks, policies and practices of border governance in the Mediterranean.  It explores why people migrate and seek to eventually cross the Mediterranean, including the numerous forms of violence the Global Majority are subjected to through imperialist borders, wars, economic and military interventions. The primary aim of such neo-colonial violence, as the guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued in a May 1979 speech at the Center for Afro-American Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), is to ‘stabilize’ capitalist relations within the capitalist-imperialist core by perpetuating wealth drain from the periphery (‘They gained surplus, they gained new markets, they gained new raw material, etc.’). This stabilisation is particularly required during times of imperialist core crisis. Citing Frantz Fanon, Rodney explained that capitalist relations in the (neo)colonies are ‘extended’ through brute force.  The case of the US backed zionist settler-colonial genocide against Palestinians makes clear how the ‘colonial state c[omes] as close as possible to pure violence’. Unlike the contradictions between labour and capital in ‘the metropole’, in the (neo)colonies ‘the relations of production [are] not “economic or market-determined”’, but rather determined by capitalist-imperialist violence, of which border militarisation is central.

In the global economy, maritime transport routes account for 90% of global trade and 95% of cyberspace traffic. The Mediterranean, with its geo-strategic location and many potential ‘choke points’, is of major importance to this traffic. Indeed, 65% of the oil and natural gas consumed in western Europe traverses the Mediterranean. The US-NATO’s proxy war on Ukraine has reinforced the importance of imported oil and gas, especially from Algeria, to European capital and social stability. A recent confidential NATO report highlights anxieties regarding Algeria’s potential to make sovereign policy decisions, such as threats to cut gas supply to Spain.  Core capitalist-imperialist states recognise that the rise of a multipolar world order, accelerated by the strategic advances of the Palestinian resistance and its regional allies (in particular Hezbollah, Yemen, Iran and, up until the western-backed regime change in early December 2024, Syria) in the face of genocide, will inevitably provide further policy space for states in the Maghreb to quell surplus value drain. This rapidly transforming global reality has raised the stakes and urgency of imperialist attempts to militarise and pacify the Mediterranean.

This report explores the structural dynamics and mechanisms through which the dominant border governance agents – the EU and US via NATO and the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), the Pentagon's outpost in Africa – attempt to maintain their geo-strategic power over the Mediterranean in the face of these overlapping crises of capitalism-imperialism. It examines the historical roots and political economy of border-making and border violence in the Mediterranean and Maghreb region. The analysis draws on Harsha Walia’s concept of ‘border imperialism’, used to describe the processes ‘by which the violences and precarities of displacement and migration are structurally created as well as maintained’. Border imperialism explains one of the key mechanisms through which unequal exchange and wealth drain from the periphery is secured, and racialised hierarchy in the international system – what W.E.B du Bois referred to as the ‘global color line’, is upheld. Borders in this sense can be understood as the lynchpin of what Charisse Burden Stelly describes as ‘capitalist racism,’ the ‘racially hierarchical political economy and social order constituting labor superexploitation, expropriation by domination, and ongoing racial/colonial primitive accumulation.’ 

The report also considers the role of militarised borders and ‘security’ collaboration in contributing to the deliberate breakdown of regional solidarity, materially undermining possibilities for integration, a prerequisite for the region’s delinking from the capitalist-imperialist core. This strategy reinforces the orientalist and patently racist dichotomy between the European ‘garden’ and the African ‘jungle', as described by Europe's senior diplomat Josep Borrell, where militarised borders are portrayed as a protective barrier preventing the ‘jungle’ from invading the ‘garden.’ This discursive landscape facilitates the dehumanisation of racialised migrants, relegating them to what Frantz Fanon described as the ‘zone of non-being,’ a condition necessary to normalize the extreme violence they endure.

To date, the Transnational Institute’s Border Wars series has focused on various aspects of deadly border regimes resulting from EU and US border policies, including an exploration of the various facets of border externalisation to third countries and what they mean in practice, exposing those profiteering both from war and conflict that force people from their homes and from the structural border violence they come up against in their search for a safe haven, or exploring how imperialism is repackaged by agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM), among other themes.

This framing paper contributes to our Border Wars work by weaving together various strands of our previous research, presenting a conceptual analysis of the structural dynamics and mechanisms through which Western powers, including the EU and US (via NATO and AFRICOM) attempt to maintain their geo-strategic power over the Mediterranean. The research examines the historical roots and political economy of border-making and border violence in the Mediterranean and countries across North Africa, examining the legal and institutional frameworks of four countries in the Maghreb – Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. The report concludes by looking at the forms of resistance that have emerged to border imperialism, some of which draw on the ethos of earlier anti-colonial, pan-African, and Third Worldist struggles to imagine and practise community beyond an imperialist-capitalist order.

Memorial for the victims of the Melilla Massacre

Memorial for the victims of the Melilla Massacre. Photo: Niamh Ní Bhriain

Key findings

  • The Mediterranean is one of the world’s deadliest borders for migrants, with at 31,178 deaths since 2014 due to EU-imposed restrictions on movement that make migration increasingly dangerous.
  • The EU uses Frontex, its Border and Coast Guard, in coordination with the US-controlled NATO and AFRICOM to enforce a racialised border system that violates the human rights of migrants. This system upholds and entrenches highly unequal relations between core capitalist states and countries across Africa. Another key mechanism is the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which oversees visas, refoulement, and the establishment of detention centres in Morocco and Tunisia where people who have been deported, often illegally, are held.
  • EU migration policies, particularly the 2020 New Pact on Migration and Asylum, emphasise border ‘security’ and the fight against ‘human trafficking’, rather than the safety and well-being of migrants. Although human trafficking is certainly an issue, it should not be conflated with smuggling and can only be combatted by addressing its structural causes, linked to the same colonial legacies and crisis of capitalist-imperialism that contribute to higher levels of migration. The heightened criminalisation of migrants and the framing of rescue missions as complicity in illegal activities only contribute to the violence against migrants.
  • The EU pressures countries such as Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia to act as its border guards, detaining and deporting migrants. This ‘cooperation’ is often coercive, based on a combination of economic incentives and sanctions in a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to enforce compliance. These tactics undermine the sovereignty of states across the Maghreb, preventing them from developing their own border policies and guaranteeing freedom of movement.
  • As a result, migration and asylum systems across the Maghreb offer little legal protection to migrants, many of whom face arrest, labour exploitation, and limited access to essential services.
  • Border imperialism plays a crucial role in stabilising the accumulation of capital by expanding and deepening the exploitation of labour and expanding the global reserve army of labour. It explains one of the key mechanisms through which unequal exchange and wealth drain from the periphery is secured, and racialised hierarchies in the international system are upheld. North African states subsidise European capital by providing education, healthcare, and training for documented and undocumented migrant workers in Europe, absorbing the costs of social reproduction, and effectively underwriting European capital accumulation.
  • Major arms and security companies from Europe, the US, and the zionist settler colonial state profit from border militarisation, driving a lucrative ‘border security’ industry that promotes further externalisation of border policies to North African states.
  • For the EU and the US (via NATO and AFRICOM) enforcing border militarisation both in the Mediterranean and on the European and African continents is also a way to maintain control in the region and advance geo-strategic interests.
  • Border imperialism in the Mediterranean plays a role in protecting zionist settler colonial rule in Palestine in general, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine in particular. It ensures that an important transportation corridor for the military-industrial-complex’s supply chain is kept open, and simultaneously blocks material expressions of regional solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.
  • Border imperialism is rooted in colonialism. Before the eighteenth century when French, British and Italian colonial powers violently expropriated the land, resources and labour of the peoples of the Maghreb, borders were fluid in these Mediterranean countries. Colonial powers used border-making as a strategy of divide and rule and a form of enclosure to enable primitive accumulation in the colonies.
  • Despite the highly unequal relations established by colonialism, before the establishment of the Schengen Area in 1985 people from Europe and the Maghreb faced minimal restrictions in crossing the Mediterranean. This very recent history has been largely forgotten, leading to the current perception that the Mediterranean has always been a space of restricted migration.
  • Across the Maghreb, there are multiple forms of both grassroots and state resistance to border militarisation, often drawing on legacies of anti-colonial struggle and regional solidarity from the 50s and 60s.
  • Arabic term ‘harraga’, referring to the act of crossing borders without authorisation, symbolises one form of defiance. Migrants also frequently express resistance through direct actions and protests against restrictive policies and detention. States have at times resisted through opposing collaboration with imperialist border actors.
  • Structurally, the rise of a multipolar world order may create more space for states to resist border imperialism by enabling them to delink from the capitalist-imperialist core and to develop and implement their own border policies in way that meets the long suppressed needs and aspirations of African peoples.