School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies (CAS) in collaboration with the Citizenship and Migration Research Network (CMRN) are delighted to welcome you to the following book launch:

After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania

Speaker: Dr Hassan Ould Moctar, Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS, University of London

When: Wednesday 12th February 2025 (3.30pm-5pm)

Where: Lecture Theatre G.04, Hugh Robson Building

Format: In-person only. Register via Eventbrite

In March 2024, the European Commission signed a €210 million migration partnership deal with Mauritania. In the context of a sharp increase in arrivals on the Canary Islands, the deal aimed to tackle these arrivals by outsourcing migration control responsibilities to Mauritania. While unprecedented in financial scope, the deal was but the latest in a long line of border externalisation policies that have been implemented across West Africa since 2006. Rather than preventing “irregular migration”, however, such policies tend to render more people “illegal”, as a rich body of critical migration and border studies literature has shown. This book discussion builds upon this literature to explore the social relations and structures in which EU migration policies manifest in Mauritania. Posing the question of who is likely to be illegalised and why, it draws from interviews conducted with a range of officials based in Mauritania as well as extensive ethnographic investigation of the urban informal economy in which most migrants in the country get by. Against this backdrop, it shows how the EU’s illegalisation of migration in Mauritania involves a coalescence between a colonial legacy of racialised territorial belonging and capitalism’s tendency to cast people out of its development.

Speaker Biography

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS, University of London. He holds a PhD in Development Studies which he obtained from SOAS and has held fellowships in SOAS and the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the relationship between migration, borders, and development processes, with a regional focus on Mauritania, the Sahel, and the Sahara. He is the author of After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania, which is available open access with Bloomsbury Publishers.