“Killing in the name of”: Territorial disputes, EU Border Externalization and Evanescent Accountability in Ceuta and Melilla._x000D_
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During the last two decades, the logic of border externalization has paved the way for a wide range of controversial migration control practices around the North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla. These practices have been vastly scrutinized from academic, journalistic and activist perspectives. These analyses have shed light, on the one hand, on the logic of exceptionality that governs the EU border regime when unfolded in these cities, and on the other, on how both migrants and activists have challenged, denounced and resisted this regime, thus contributing to its constant reconfiguration. The text adresses the aftermath of the Spanish-Moroccan diplomatic-border “crisis” of May 2021 (Ferrer-Gallardo and Gabrielli, 2022). It examines how this triggered a new reconfiguration of cross-border mobility management in the region and, as the deadly events at the Melilla fence in June 2022 illustrate, to the consolidation of Spanish-Moroccan brutalitarian operational cooperation. This has entailed the recrudescence of migratory obstruction practices at the gepolitically contested EU land borders in Africa._x000D_
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References_x000D_
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Ferrer-Gallardo, X., & Gabrielli, L. (2022). The Ceuta Border Peripeteia: Tasting the Externalities of EU Border Externalization. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 1-11. _x000D_

Xavier Ferrer-Gallardo
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

 
ID Abstract: 496