Lorena Gazzotti: Immigration Nation. Aid, control and border politics in Morocco

HUMA Book Launch

Author: Lorena Gazzotti (University of Cambridge, UK)

Description: Over the past forty years, countries in the Global North have increasingly restricted their migration policies to reduce the arrival of migrants. As part of this, development aid has become a central tool in the migration control strategy pursued by European countries and the US, with donors, International Organisations and NGOs becoming prominent actors. In this book, Lorena Gazzotti shows that migration control is not only exercised through fences and deportation. Building on extensive research in Morocco, Gazzotti shows that aid marks the rise of a substantially different mode of migration containment, one where power works beyond fast violence, and its disciplinary potential is augmented precisely by its elusiveness. Where existing studies on border externalisation have essentialised donors, International Organisations and NGOs, with countries of 'origin' and 'transit' as compliant subcontractors, and border control as a neat form of intervention, this nuanced study unsettles such assumptions, to show that bordering happens in everyday, mundane fashions, far away from the spectacle of border violence. See the book: Immigration Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

About the author: Dr Lorena Gazzotti’s work explores the containment of people deemed "dangerous" to the security of late liberal societies. She mainly focuses on the Spanish-Moroccan border as a space of inquiry and on border control as an analytical frame to investigate the emergence of new tools to contain marginalised and racialised populations at the frontiers of inequality. Lorena obtained her PhD in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2019. Before Cambridge, she completed a BA and MA in Foreign Languages at the University of Bologna. She has held visiting positions at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the Centre Jacques Berque pour les Études en Sciences Sociales (CJB) in Morocco.

Discussant: Nabil Ferdaouissi, Doctoral Research Fellow at HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town. Nabil obtained a Bachelor's degree in English Literary Studies at Ibn Zohr University, Morocco, and a Master's degree in Cultural Studies at the University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Morocco. He worked as a research assistant at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), collaborating with a multidisciplinary research group on migration, borders, and gender in North and West Africa. Nabil has been a teaching assistant in Cultural Studies at the University of Ibn Zohr and a research assistant at IREMAM, Université d'Aix-Marseille, France. He also serves as an editorial assistant at Politikon: the IAPSS Journal of Political Science. At HUMA, his PhD project examines the cultural anthropology of migration and borders, with a geographical focus on North and West Africa.