# Inside the Pushback Apparatus in Tunisia: Countering Mobility, Extracting its Value and Manufacturing Infrastructures of Solidarity

Luca Queirolo Palmas, Camille Cassarini

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Luca Queirolo Palmas, Camille Cassarini. Inside the Pushback Apparatus in Tunisia: Countering Mobility, Extracting its Value and Manufacturing Infrastructures of Solidarity. Critical Criminology, 2025, 33 (1), pp.33-52. 10.1007/s10612-025-09822-7. hal-05444986

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# Inside the Pushback Apparatus in Tunisia: Countering Mobility, Extracting its Value and Manufacturing Infrastructures of Solidarity

Luca Queirolo Palmas<fnref n="1" /> · Camille Cassarini<fnref n="2" />

Accepted: 23 April 2025 / Published online: 16 June 2025
© The Author(s) 2025

## Abstract

Since 2023, Tunisia has implemented a new migration management policy marked by intensified security-led pushbacks of Black sub-Saharan migrants from coastal cities to its national borders, echoing similar practices in Algeria, Libya, and Morocco. Despite widespread national and international criticism, this approach has persisted and grown increasingly complex, with an expanding network of routes and increased frequency of forced movements. This policy operates within a broader regional and global migration regime (Mezzadra S, Neilson B in Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Duke University Press, 2013) aimed at containing so-called "undesirable" mobility by keeping migrants in constant motion, often culminating in their return through mechanisms like the IOM's Assisted Voluntary Return program. While this regional framework discourages viewing Tunisia as an exceptional case, the country's distinct post-revolutionary context and longstanding West African migration presence offer critical insights into how migrants navigate, resist, and adapt to evolving border control strategies.

## Introduction

Since 2023, Tunisia has been the subject of a new migration management policy. Following the example of Algeria, Libya and Morocco, the security forces have vigorously engaged a series of movements and push-backs of Black foreign migrants from the major coastal cities to the national borders.<fnref n="1" /> Despite numerous national and international protests, this policy seems to continue and to become more complex (through the multiplication of

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="1">¹ “Desert Dumps”, Lighthouse reports, MAY 21, 2024. https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/desert-dumps/</footnote>

<footnote>Luca Queirolo Palmas
luca.palmas@unige.it</footnote>

<footnote>Camille Cassarini
camille.cassarini@gmail.com</footnote>

<footnote n="1">¹ University of Genova, Genoa, Italy</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain, Tunis, Tunisia</footnote>
routes and the number of push-backs). More broadly, this policy is embedded in a regional and global migration regime (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) designed to contain undesirable mobility by permanently putting people on the move, gradually leading them to give up their migration project and return to their country of origin, notably through international programmes such as the IOM's Assisted Voluntary Return program. While this regional dimension invites us to avoid the analytical pitfall of any *Tunisian particularism*, the much longer history of West African immigration and the post-revolutionary conditions of migration management in Tunisia provide an interesting starting point for understanding the way in which mobility actors face up and compose strategies in response to the counter-mobility measures put in place by local actors of the border regime.

The current spectacle of border violence in Tunisia could seem as a paradox: while there is nothing new about departures by sea in Tunisia, for a long time they have concerned only a small number of Black foreigners, most of whom had settled in the Sfax metropolitan area or, more residually and for a limited period of time, in the Medenine region, near the Libyan border. Nevertheless, since the early months of 2023 when border control was significantly strengthened, this region has become the main departure zone for Black foreigners in the central Mediterranean (Table 1).

Away from the media spotlight, the counter-mobility measures which have been put in place since the summer of 2023 are based on a combination of different migration control instruments. While the violence and the coordination between these instruments may appear to be a new phenomenon, they are above all the result of a slow process of political construction of space, which begun under the Ben Ali regime (Ben Jemia 2007; Cassarino 2018; Monia 2009) and accelerated in the aftermath of the revolutionary event,<fnref n="2" /> reaching a climax with the current socio-economic situation in Tunisia. Close to the sea, the border space which contains mobility in Tunisia is also made up of towns and places operating as a network. Less visible and less spectacularized Tunisian towns and cities have been the privileged spaces of this fabric since 2011, both through forms of security control (police checks at bus stations, arbitrary detention of undocumented migrants, spatial dispersal, coercion, and so on) and through more flexible and more incentive-based approaches to

<table><caption>**Table 1** Proportion of Sub-Saharan African nationals arriving in Italy from the Tunisian coast. Source: UNHCR, 2023</caption><thead><tr><th>Year</th><th>From Tunisia</th><th>Tunisian citizens</th><th>Citizens of Sub-Saharan African countries<sup>a</sup></th><th>% of Tunisian citizens (%)</th><th>% of citizens of Sub-Saharan African countries (%)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>2018</td><td>5,799</td><td>5,181</td><td>618</td><td>89.3</td><td>10.7</td></tr><tr><td>2019</td><td>3,633</td><td>2,654</td><td>979</td><td>73.1</td><td>26.9</td></tr><tr><td>2020</td><td>14,685</td><td>12,883</td><td>1,802</td><td>87.7</td><td>12.3</td></tr><tr><td>2021</td><td>20,218</td><td>15,671</td><td>4,547</td><td>77.5</td><td>22.5</td></tr><tr><td>2022</td><td>32,371</td><td>18,148</td><td>14,223</td><td>56.1</td><td>43.9</td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote><sup>a</sup>These categories (Tunisian citizens and citizens of Sub-Saharan African countries) are those used by the institutions and do not reflect the positions of the authors. They are highly questionable, as they reflect unfounded racial hierarchies. However, we use them in this context because they illustrate the national structures of the groups involved in sea travel from Tunisia.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² We could mention the significant increase in departures which followed the first few months of 2011. However, these seem to be the result of temporary disorganization within the national security apparatus, as checks resumed very quickly, in some cases even more vigorously.</footnote>
humanitarian support aimed at communities defined as *migrant*. In their own way, cities such as Sfax and Medenine, like Lampedusa, have been the setting of an "intrigue between humanitarianism and security" (Cuttitta 2015) in migration control.

The ways in which humanitarian and security considerations are intertwined and complementary in migration control are now well known and have even been theorized (Agier 2003; Cuttitta 2022). However, it is interesting to note that few of these studies have attempted to understand how counter-mobility measures may have resulted in new migratory dynamics which are even more intense than those they were supposed to contain (Andersson 2014; Genova 2017). The case of the Sfax region and the counter-mobility system which was established there in 2023 constitutes yet another fitting example of the many ways in which the *frontierization* of an area can be a political construct. There is nothing innate or 'natural' about border areas (Szary and Giraut 2015); they are never created *ex nihilo*, but always originate from migratory situations which were largely produced by the deployment of networks of border actors (states, NGOs, IGOs) whose logic often materializes in the urban space (Streiff-Fénart 2012). From this point of view, border areas are also places where the frictions between migration and border logics are sometimes the most visible. In Tunisia, Sfax and southern Tunisia (Zagaria and Périer 2019) are particularly fitting examples of these tensions.

This article is based on an empirical research project which developed in two different phases. The first one is the result of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2022 in the region of Sfax and Medenine as part of a doctoral research project. The second one is the result of collective ethnographic fieldwork carried out on different occasions in the Sfax region and southern Tunisia since May 2023. During these fieldwork periods, open-ended and semi-directive interviews as well as direct observations were carried out with several people on the move. Based on this material, this article describes the current counter-mobility system from two main perspectives. The first is an attempt to historicize the counter-mobility apparatus, by emphasizing the gradual shift from a system which was initially based on humanitarian containment put in place around Sfax and near the Libyan border to a security-based approach, mainly using pushback as a spatial dispersion instrument. This historicization provides an in-depth understanding of how the counter-mobility system interacted with new migratory practices and of the construction of a new migration industry. The second perspective offers an empirical reconstruction of the contemporary transformations which the pushback apparatus (insofar as it is a tool at the service of the counter-mobility policies) has engendered in the Sfax migration industry and Tunisian borderscapes. By so doing, it explores the value generated by pushbacks, something highlighted by many racialized people on the move, victims of these operations, through the methaphor of *Black gold*. Yet, our approach explores how the push-back corridors (Kasparek 2016) are constantly challenged by solidarity logics and mutual help produced by, and circulating as an energy (Bonnin et al. 2024a), among people in migration. Solidarity practices can transform a forced corridor into a lived-in route: a space of dwelling, hospitality and care.
Historicizing the Counter-Mobility Apparatus in Southern Tunisia

Like other countries in the region, such as Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, Tunisia has not escaped the development of similar patterns of mobility and border checks. Since the early 2000s, the presence of West African immigrants has been attested and, far from being considered as *in transit* by NGOs, IGOs and European states, these people are settling in Tunisian towns and cities in search of work (Boubakri and Mazzella 2005). This migratory landscape prevailed throughout the 2000s, in a context in which the interests of European member states and of the Tunisian government were mainly focused on controlling the emigration of Tunisian nationals from the country (Cassarino 2016). This situation changed radically in the early months of 2011, at the crossroads of three African political crises.

The first one concerned the change of regime in the Ivory Coast, where, after more than a decade of conflict, the post-electoral crisis of 2010 led to the election of Alassane Ouattara, putting an end to the historical system of distribution of ethno-political wealth between groups in the country (Cassarini 2022a). The second crisis concerned Tunisia, where, from the city of Sidi Bouzid, a series of revolutionary mobilizations spread across the country and put an end to the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and to the first Tunisian Republic (Allal and Geisser 2018). The third crisis concerned Libya, where mobilizations calling for the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi's regime triggered a process of political fragmentation and armed struggle between different groups (Bensaâd 2012a). These three crises transformed the infrastructure of intra-African migration on several levels.

On a continental level, the Libyan crisis permanently destructured the Euro-African migration system, insofar as Libya had previously been the largest immigration country in North Africa and several hundred thousand workers from Sub-Saharan Africa had settled there, in some cases for decades (Bensaâd 2012b). The outbreak of civil war and the resulting political fragmentation forced many of these immigrants to leave, either heading toward European shores or returning to their countries of origin. At the same time, southern Tunisia and western Egypt took in large numbers of these workers and refugees, who were hastily housed in several camps on the borders between these countries and Libya (Boubakri and Potot 2012; Mottet 2016). With around two million immigrant workers, Libya was a key node along the Saharan and African migration routes. From major West African cities to Agadez, Saharan migratory flows had hitherto concentrated mainly in the central Sahara region and, to a lesser extent, along the Atlantic coast (Brachet et al. 2011). While the Libyan conflict did not stop these flows, it also resulted in the opening of new routes, via Algeria and Mauritania, as well as, further east, via Sudan, Chad, and Egypt. On a regional scale, the Libyan crisis also transformed the migratory landscape of neighboring countries (Ciabarri 2014). Apart from Egypt, Tunisia, due to its proximity to the region of Tripoli (the most densely populated in Libya), is the country where the most significant effects have been and are still being felt.

The opening of the Choucha camp and the arrival of 550,000 workers in southern Tunisia established the idea that migration management had become a humanitarian emergency (Boubakri 2015). In addition to the fact that the Tunisian authorities had never had to deal with a similar phenomenon, southern Tunisia, which had historically been marginalized by the central state, did not have sufficient human and technical resources to manage a refugee camp on this scale. This is how the Choucha camp and, to a lesser extent, the Ramada camp further south, came into being in the early months of 2011. Generally speaking, the Choucha camp marked the arrival in Tunisia of several international organizations working
in the field of migration management. Running this camp in the context of *revolutionary euphoria* also convinced the Tunisian authorities and civil society that international management can go hand in hand with a more virtuous approach to management, one which respects rights, unlike under the Ben Ali regime. In the months and years that followed, this humanitarian approach had concrete effects on the establishment of a new border configuration in Tunisia (Cassarini 2022b).

By moving from a system based on police control over and security checks in the area to a system in which humanitarian controls were superimposed, the border system was redesigned around new actors and sites. Paradoxically, the immediate post-Choucha period (2013–2017) coincided with a situation of relative migratory stability in Tunisia. The resumption of security checks in the whole Tunisian maritime area drastically reduced the number of Tunisians leaving the country by sea, while the militias’ control of Libyan migration infrastructure led to a drop in the number of people entering Tunisia from Libya. From 2014 to 2019, the number of foreign nationals and refugees arriving in southern Tunisia has stabilized at a few hundred per year. As a result, since the closure of the Choucha camp, the Médénine region has come to be seen as a place where the *migratory crisis* in the region could be accommodated and territorialized. Historical actors involved in managing the camp, such as the IOM and the UNHCR, have been negotiating since 2013 to set up several *antennae* to coordinate the management of migration in southern Tunisia in close collaboration with governmental and non-governmental actors.

On a regional scale, the towns of Ben Gardane, Medenine, and Zarzis functioned as the first attempts at urban containment in Tunisia, encouraging migrants who had arrived from Libya or had been picked up at sea to either stay in particularly difficult socio-economic conditions or return to Libya to attempt another crossing. In southern Tunisia, the border system is built around a network of different border locations (reception centers, detention centers, and so on) where governmental, non-governmental, and humanitarian actors guide, direct, and encourage migrants to voluntarily return or go to Libya. From the outset, therefore, it was conceived as a regional and cross-border migration containment area.

The city of Sfax, however, only became part of this border system much later, which can be attributed to two main factors: the first is linked to the fact that Sfax has only recently welcomed foreign nationals from sub-Saharan Africa, the second one is that the sub-Saharan immigration, which began in 2013, has built up slowly around networks of actors that have provided these migrants with relatively solid forms of integration in and connection with the local socio-economic structure. Until 2018, Sfax had hardly received any people coming in from Libya after crossing the Sahara. However, the migratory networks which were present there had brought in almost exclusively Ivorian or other West African nationals who had reached Tunisia by air. Humanitarian actors began to arrive in 2015 when the IOM, which had been informed of the presence of West African migrants, decided to reopen an office that had been closed since 2012 for lack of *foreign beneficiaries*.<fnref n="3" /> The same year saw the establishment of a branch of Terre d'Asile Tunisie, an NGO which initially relied on the local network of associations and religious organizations to develop integration and support services for migrants who were considered to be "vulnerable" (Cassarini 2023). Thus, despite a *dual* migratory system polarized around two different networks, the border system was gradually extended to include settled migrants who were relatively self-sufficient.

<footnote n="3">³ It is important to highlight that IOM was also managing *voluntary return* projects for Tunisians from Europe.</footnote>
This situation prevailed until 2020 when, due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic autonomy of these people was affected, and many migration projects were redesigned around a departure project for the island of Lampedusa. Indeed, immigration from West Africa, which up to that point had been structured around solid mechanisms of integration into the local labor market, was no longer characterized by classic mechanisms of capital accumulation, such as weekly or daily employment. The mass unemployment which primarily affected irregularized West African migrants led many of them to opt to invest in a move to Italy. In a relatively short space of time, this initial shift boosted the local migration industry in the Sfax region—from Sidi Mansour to the Kerkennah Islands—and undermined the old humanitarian and urban containment measures.

This momentary shift led to an increase of police controls in the region, both in urban and maritime areas, where the national guard was seeking to establish control. This increase is rooted in the structure of migration routes in the central Mediterranean, where the itinerary followed by many boats departing from Libya crosses the route of those coming from the Sfax region in Tunisia. The increase in interception operations by the Tunisian National Guard<fnref n="4" /> in this area has led to a situation in which Sfax has become a regional *disembarkation* platform, where migrants from Libya settle and, particularly in the center of Sfax, rub shoulders with adventurers<fnref n="5" /> from the Ivory Coast and other West African countries. This spatial co-presence of different migration profiles and experiences has given rise to a series of technical and economic circulations, some of which directly concern the migration industry.

Among these, the construction of metal boats constitutes the most important socio-technical transformation in the regional migration field, a shift which has altered the structure and dynamics of the local migration industry, which had hitherto been controlled by the fishing industry and by a few well-established West African intermediaries. It was probably the arrival of Gambian fishermen—intercepted off the Tunisian coast and disembarked in Sfax—and their connections with tour operator intermediaries which allowed the metal-boat technique to spread and considerably increase the departure capacity of the local migration industry. It was at the time when this major socio-technical transformation took place and the presidential speech<fnref n="6" /> was delivered (Cassarini and Geisser 2023) that the pushback machine was set in motion in February 2023.

The president's speech and the memorandum of understanding co-signed by the European Union and the Italian government<fnref n="7" /> on the fight against illegal migration, may be seen as turning points in the structure and implementation of counter-mobility measures in southern Tunisia. In June 2023, in response to an increasing flow of migrants (that Tunisia itself had generated), to mass evictions from their homes and to a lack of measures other than humanitarian ones, the local authorities began to organize several forced removals of Black foreigners from the center of Sfax to the agricultural region of El Amra. These

<footnote n="4">⁴ “Interrupted sea—The illegal and violent practices of the Tunisian National Guard in the Central Mediterranean, Alarm Phone, June 2024”.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ From an epic point of view, the term *adventurer* refers to the way in which certain African migrants represent themselves and their migratory trajectories. As an analytical concept, *adventure migration* seeks to combine what people on the move have to say about their mobility with what researchers have to say about it. For more details (Bredeloup 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ On 21 February 2023, the president of the Tunisian republic, Kais Saied, declared that sub-Saharan immigration to Tunisia was part of a conspiracy aimed to change Tunisia's demographic balance, and called for a fight against it.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_23_3870</footnote>
movements were coercive in nature. They were carried out under duress and served a pro-
ject of ethno-urban cleansing which aimed to make the Black population of the city center
invisible. The obvious lack of suitable housing for such an influx of people in the El Amra
region considerably worsened the health conditions of this group. The continuous arriv-
als of groups from Sfax over the following months turned the El Amra region into a new
migration hub, where new migration economies and industries emerged with links to the
local Tunisian population, who were already shaped by mobility configurations and the so
called *harga*.<fnref n="8" /> It was in this context that, from the summer onward, the first pushback of
Black foreigners toward the deserted border regions near Libya and Algeria began to take
place.

Black Gold: Preying on People on the Move, Extracting Value from the Pushback Corridor

As in other contexts that have been affected by EU policies of border externalization, in contemporary Tunisia pushbacks are one of the main methods for managing people on the move, mainly Blacks from sub-Saharan countries. Their extent and characteristics have changed also as a consequence of the authoritarian and xenophobic turn in the Tunisian regime (Geisser 2023). Thus, the *modus operandi* that characterizes pushbacks exceeds the definitions of *expulsion* and *deportation*, which usually refer to the legal process of forced repatriation of illegalized foreigners to their countries of origin.<fnref n="9" />

Due to the disruption this practice causes to the cardinal principles of international law, the issue of pushbacks received significant media attention in July 2023. At the time, the international press covered several ‘removals’ (a recurrent term used in the journalistic field) to the desert and the borders with Algeria and Libya, targeting hundreds of migrants, including pregnant women, mothers, and children.<fnref n="10" /> If, on the one hand, the scandal generated by the images that began to circulate forced the Tunisian government to take a step back and implement a cosmetic humanitarian operation through the exclusive mandate to a directly controlled organization to supposedly assist people dumped at the Algerian and Libyan borders (the Red Crescent), this did not prevent the European Union from signing a financial and political agreement to turn Tunisia into a new guardian of the Central Mediterranean along with Libya.<fnref n="11" /> From that moment on, interceptions at sea and pushbacks in the desert accelerated, with little coverage in the international press and becoming a structural element of the externalization of EU borders. In these operations, police arbitrariness and state violence<fnref n="12" /> against an anonymous mass of migrants prevail over laws, as these only apply to individuals. This denial of individual legal rights is a clear sign of how state actions define migrants as non-persons (Dal Lago 2005).

<footnote n="8"><sup>8</sup> El harga means irregular migration in Maghrebian dialect.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ However, the term *deportation* is the one used by the people we met during the research to define the pushbacks they, or their friends, experienced.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/tunisia-removes-hundreds-migrants-desert-border-region-rights-group-lawmaker-2023-07-05/</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ See: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_3887. For a critical review, see: https://en.asgi.it/eu-tunisia-memorandum-the-european-union-endorses-illegal-raids-deportations-and-viole-nce-against-migrants/</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² For a cartography of the violence inflicted on people on the move in Tunisia, see OMCT (2023): https://omct-tunisie.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Migration-et-torture-Finale-Planches-.pdf</footnote>
The practices we describe here fall outside the concept of deportability (De Genova 2002) as a threat of last resort against foreigners, illegalized people or offenders, but pertain to the chronicle of everyday life. Our ethnographic observation was carried out in the rural encampments north of Sfax where departures to Lampedusa are organized (Amigoni and Bonnin 2025; Bonnin et al. 2024a, b). In these contexts, pushbacks are common and widespread events; they are a collective and repeated experience for the majority of Black people on the move. All the people in our network of correspondents<fnref n="13" /> have been victims of this type of punishment in a range of situations: as a consequence of a failed attempt to cross the Sicilian Channel, during police raids at their workplaces in fields or on construction sites, during evictions of their encampments, during everyday activities (at cafes, at the post office, at the market) or at the end of a period of detention. Despite the differences between the stories of these people, there are some shared elements in how these pushbacks operations were carried out. Firstly, there were no magistrates or lawyers involved, and no legal documents were given to individuals, thus placing this phenomenon outside the rule of law and within the operational framework of what is effectively an authoritarian police state.<fnref n="14" /> Secondly, the lives of our correspondents are structurally organized around escaping, finding new ways to resist and avoid arrest and pushbacks, so that they can proceed with their journeys. Thirdly, they are dumped in inhospitable places, no man's lands between Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria, where state and criminal actors as well as actors operating in the field of the illegalized migration industry come together, (re)producing new escape routes and forms of forced mobility. Finally, there are no signs of any relevant humanitarian governance; to borrow Didier Fassin's terminology on the moral economy of migration policies (Fassin 2005), there is no compassion here, only repression.

In October 2023, to quote a recurrent expression used by people on the move, "the sea gate was closed",<fnref n="15" /> which alludes to the role of politics and police in flexibly managing the flow of departures in order to increase the value of Tunisia's role as guardians of the EU's external borders. At the time, removal (Fig. 1) operations had become a daily and violent occurrence.

Diana, a 20-year-old woman who was pushed back three times in less than 12 months, told us about her experience: "People who were intercepted at sea and used to be released at the port, at some point either didn't return to our camps or were seen arriving after a

<footnote n="13">¹³ Since May 2023, the ongoing ethnographic research project has relied on a network of 10 people on the move acting as *correspondents* (from Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, including 2 women). Some of them do not have any kind of legal residence, others are asylum seekers with UNHCR status. Although they have been escaping constantly to avoid being caught by the state, at the time of writing they are located in Tunis, Sfax, Jebiniana, Tataouine, and in Tebessa (Algeria) as a result of a pushback. We use the term *correspondent*, borrowed from the journalistic field, for two main reasons: on the one hand because research participants have been sending us a constant stream of information, in the form of videos and voice messages about daily life, repression, and the social construction of travel in Tunisia; on the other hand because the contents they produced, and still produce, are part of a public and partisan sociology project (Bourawoy 2021) to otherwise narrate undocumented journeys, deploying digital technologies as a way of communicating and disseminating research. See: IG @routesjournal.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ In February 2022, President Saied dissolved the independent supreme court of justice and replaced it with an institution which operates under his control. In May 2024 several Tunisian activists for human rights are detained in a new regime crackdown on civil society. See:</footnote>

<footnote>https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/MDE3052692022ENGLISH.pdf https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/05/tunisia-repressive-crackdown-on-civil-society-organizations-following-months-of-escalating-violence-against-migrants-and-refugees/</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ In order to increase Tunisia's negotiating power with the EU, thousands of people were allowed to sail off and reach Lampedusa in the space of just a few days at the end of September 2023.</footnote>
long time, stripped of all their belongings. In Tunisia, we, Black passengers, don't end up in prison but in the desert. Prison is for captains and organizers." Diana's point of view quickly turns into an embodied knowledge which is shared and circulated – a fate, but also a form of collective punishment for those who are intercepted by the Tunisian Coast Guard as they attempt to cross.

When we talked to Malcolm (an officer of a major international agency) about the per-vasiveness of this horizon of common sense among Black people on the move,<fnref n="16" /> he con-firmed what we had already heard from Diana: "As an organization, we cannot in any way take a position unless there is irrefutable evidence. When the outcomes of independent investigations came out in July, we spoke out publicly. Now we cannot do that. As an indi-vidual, I can tell you that a lot happens when there are no eyes to see..." His words point to the Tunisian state's effective and violent forcing of mobility.

Sylla is a 24-year-old man who introduces himself as a *boussolier*: the one who uses the compass to plan the sea route. He, too, was pushed back three times within a short period of time. This is what he told us about a recent incident, asking for his testimony to be filmed: "We were working in the olive groves in Sfax and the police arrived. It was a Saturday and they arrested all of us. We lost a week's worth of work, because the boss didn't pay us." Sylla was first taken to a police station and then to the port of Sfax, where he was added to a large group of people who had been intercepted at sea. "They loaded 300 of us onto an articulated bus. We didn't know where it was going. They gave us psycho-tropic drugs to make us sleep and handcuffed us with plastic cable ties. On the bus, men in uniform with guns beat us up, stealing everything we had. And we couldn't do anything, because we had no strength. The trip lasted the whole night. In the morning we saw some road signs: Libya, 150 km."

When they were approaching the border area, the police were replaced by the army: "there were seven checkpoints, at each one the military beat us up [he shows the signs of leg and head injuries] and looked again for money, documents, and phones. We were tor-tured, hit with bars, treated like animals, like slaves." Sylla often uses the term *Black gold* to describe his own condition as a resource and in doing so he links the practice of push-backs to the economy in which Black people are sold and kidnapped: "Being sold takes place during many of the deportations to Libya. Tunisian soldiers beat you up and divide you into groups of ten, then they hand you over to their Libyan colleagues; I've seen money being counted before my eyes during the exchange. Then the Libyans sell you back to a militia that takes you to jail and from there, if you call your family and have the money for the ransom (*the price ranges from 600 to 1,500 euros*), they release you. Finally, if you still have money to pay a *passeur*, they take you back to Tunisia. Some people die on the road. I have loaded onto a pickup truck the bodies of some comrades who couldn't withstand the violence. I don't know what happens to them, if they end up being used in organ trafficking." The price of *Black gold* varies: "If you're strong, you cost more because you work better and the Libyans need that; even if you are a woman, you are worth more because you can become a sex object. Many get stuck because their families don't have money for the ransom, and they go crazy."

In this narrative, pushbacks are like a corridor, a logistical corridor which integrates states and militias, connecting the externalization of EU borders with the kidnapping

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Social media channels are widely used by illegalized travelers to share knowledge and update information about the state of the route. Pushbacks, arrests, scams, and kidnappings are among the main topics of discussion.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1** Tunisian authorities bussing Black people to Libya. Image of pushback. *Source:* Image of a push-back circulating across social media of people on the move and provided by Diana</figcaption></figure>

industry in Libya. One of the stations where *Black gold* is stored, delivered, and exchanged between soldiers was pointed out to us on Google Maps by Hassan (Fig. 2)—a humanitarian aid worker in southern Tunisia—who never uses the words *deportees* or *pushbacks*, but prefers to describe them more euphemistically as the *retournés*, those who come from Sfax and want to go to Libya: "That is a matter for the army, we cannot do anything. They are left in a deserted area on the right side of the road going to Libya. Now there are about 150 deposited there, in Ennadhour/Taguelmit."

Another correspondent, Toussaint, recounted a similar experience in a video call that he asked us to film: "They arrested me in the olive groves under suspicion of being an organizer, captain, and boat maker, because in my backpack they had found spark plugs and wrenches for the engine." After 9 months of detention in Sfax as boat captain, he was released but immediately locked on a bus heading to Libya: "First, the police beat me up as if I had carried out a state coup. Then Tunisian soldiers sold me to the Libyan ones. I saw the former hand over a bag with all our phones, passports and documents, and receive a bundle of money. When I was in prison, everyone knew it: they sell Black people for $100 each." Toussaint is now in an informal semi-detention facility in Zaouia, waiting to get together enough money to be taken back to Tunisia by the network of smugglers; to quote
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2** A delivery station for Black Gold. Source: Position was sent by Hassan</figcaption></figure>

Sylla, he is among the ones who are “going crazy”. Our phone conversations reveal a state of constant psychic pain and perceived existential insecurity. Often, as we talk, we hear the sounds of gunfire in the background: "everyone here is armed, even the kids."

I report every detail of Sylla's story to Malcolm, the international agency officer. This time, without any hesitation, he says: "Of course, welcome to Tunisia." As the conversation goes on, he points out the different characteristics of a recent pushback toward the Algerian border that he has dealt with: "The deportees had my number, they called me from the desert where they had been dumped by the soldiers. They gave me the position. But as an organization we couldn't do anything. I as an individual can't do anything. It is the Red Crescent that's supposed to intervene, but they don't. In the end, I lost touch with those people, their phones died. They're still there as we speak, either they're managing on their own or no one will help them. Some will have survived, the others will be dead. What do you want me to say? Here you are forced to normalize what you see, otherwise you go crazy."
We also managed to hear the version of one of the victims of this same pushback to Algeria, a worker in the gardening industry: "They arrested me at home, at night. I still have all my things in that apartment. On a bus, we were tied up and guarded by armed people, they seized our cell phones, and then they dumped us in the desert. Some of us were workers, but there were also Black university students. The police shredded everyone's documents, not making too many distinctions. There, we started to be ping-ponged between the Tunisian and Algerian authorities, and we were the ball: a little bit here and a little bit there. One woman even gave birth (*he shows us videos*); it was thanks to her that we were able to hide a cell phone, call Malcolm, and tell him what we were going through using social media platforms. People from nearby villages were feeding us and some of the Algerian soldiers had good hearts. I saw one crying. In the end, some of us went to Algiers, some came back here... some were sick, I don't know what happened to them."

According to Malcolm (and this is a statement which is corroborated by the direct experience of many people on the move), there is a kidnapping industry whose actors include Tunisians and Black migrants, a low-key operation with minor involvement of state apparatuses compared to the Libyan border<fnref n="17" />: "From Algeria, you come back to Tunisia paying a taxi-mafia or getting into debt, in which case, they lock you into a house in Sfax because you're an asset and they ask people's families to pay a ransom." Once they are freed, the people who have been pushed back return to the encampments and try crossing the sea one more time, opening a new cycle of predation and value extraction in this corridor.

## Exploring Pushbacks Rationales

The effectiveness of pushbacks with regard to their explicit rationale—that is the removal of people on the move from Tunisia—is dubious. On the Libyan side, much like on the Algerian side, those who do not succumb to the desert or to violence rejoin the ever-moving population of the *boza*.<fnref n="18" /> Despite the institutional and violent construction of a hostile and inimical space, Black people and migrants can be pushed away, but they can never be eliminated. In Tunisia, many continue to arrive, many stay, many are expelled, and just as many make their way back to Tunisia; sometimes the *sea gate* opens up, sometimes it shuts down, based on a color line divide and on political contingencies.<fnref n="19" /> In short, it is an unwanted, circulating mass, moving and being moved.

For this very reason, two more rationales which emerge from the analysis of the correspondents' accounts seem particularly relevant. The first is the management of excessive mobility through a forced counter-mobility propelled by the institutions (Tazzioli 2019).

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ See the journalistic investigation in Le Monde: https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2023/12/27/en-tunisie-les-migrants-subsahariens-desormais-sous-la-menace-de-reseaux-de-kidnappeurs_6207920_3212.html</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ People on the move, mainly West-Africans, use the term *boza* to describe the act of transgressing EU borders. See (Cassarini and Queirolo Palmas 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ According to the Italian Ministry of Interior, during 2023, 157,652 people disembarked in Italy, with 17,322 people coming from Tunisia, which is second only to Guinea as country of origin (see: http://www.libertaciviliimmigrazione.dlci.interno.gov.it/sites/default/files/allegati/cruscotto_statistico_giornaliero_31-12-2023.pdf). According to the Tunisian social rights organization FTDES (see: https://ftdes.net/statistique-s-migration-2023/), in 2023 there were 1,300 departure-related deaths and around 50,000 interceptions at sea by the Coast Guard (Tunisian authorities inflate this figure to over 80,000 people). There is no official data on pushbacks, but we know that this is the fate awaiting the vast majority of people intercepted at sea.</footnote>
This goes hand in hand with the spectacle of control (De Genova 2013)— foregrounding the funding bodies and the credibility of both the EU and Tunisia as gatekeepers—but also with the hunt for people on the move (Andersson 2014; Gonzalo 2022; Queirolo Palmas and Rahola 2022) whose aim is to induce physical and moral exhaustion (Vries and Guild 2019). On this point, Malcolm points out that "they came on foot from Burkina, from Mali, from the Ivory Coast... they are sustained by religion and fatalism. They always evoke God. No matter how much they are treated like beasts, no one will stop them." Neverthe- less, in the correspondents' accounts, fear is always associated with the possibility of being sent back, while sailing off toward Europe, despite being tremendously dangerous, is sur- rounded by feelings of hope and yearning. When I first entered a 'bunker'—the expression passengers of a convoy use to define the physical place where they are assembled before departing—people gathered around me, asking for information about Lampedusa and Italy. As I started talking to them, explaining how to call for rescue in case they find themselves in danger of shipwreck, several passengers interrupted me, saying: "I'm not afraid of the sea, I'm afraid of the desert where they deported me. I walked 120 km in five days, it is full of dead bodies and as you walk you see corpses everywhere. If a comrade is sick, you can't do anything but abandon them." Another passenger says: "Luckily I had hidden my phone, I managed to find the point with Google Maps and went in the right direction. The Tunisian soldiers had left me in the middle of nowhere. I walked alone for six days, day and night, alone. Without a brother to motivate me not to give up... It was the hardest thing that's ever happened to me. How was I going to drink and eat? People I met on the road helped me with water and dried fruit. I didn't follow the paved road but walked beside it to avoid being picked up by the police and sent back to Algeria once again."

The second principle to emerge from our analysis is economic-extractive and micro-predatory. In his account, Hammadi, a Tunisian aid worker in a large southern city, confirms the commodity-value of the people who are pushed back: "The deportation buses are handed over to a different police escort in Medenine or Gabes. Here, a new team takes over and the other officers go back. What happens? Those on the first shift have already stolen everything from the migrants' pockets, but those on the second shift—mainly the military who run the border garrisons—have to get something out of them, because the deportees have nothing left. What do the soldiers do? They sell them to the Libyans. I seem to remember the price is 100 euros per person."<fnref n="20" /> Hammadi's account does not frame the act of selling people as slavery, but rather as corruption and predation, as a form of income supplement: "It's like with smuggling... Police officers have starvation wages and need to take their share." Following Hamza Meddeb, actors operating in the field of smuggling use the term 'the price of the road' to refer to the toll that needs to be levied by different authorities to let goods through; in the case we are examining, we could speak of the *price of the route* (Meddeb 2022).

Among Black people on the move and among the Tunisians who have some direct or indirect experience of illegalized migration, it is a common truth that, in order to be effective (that is to succeed in exiting Tunisian national waters), any departure must be *pulled* by the police, authorized by them in a way. This may explain why Ashraf, a sea-worker in the tourism industry, bursts out laughing when he responds to my request to comment on a recent police raid against the so-called *reseau des organizateurs* (Tunisian smugglers

<footnote n="20">²⁰ For other testimonies on this topic see: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/53906/migrants-in-tunisia-transferred-to-libyan-prisons; https://www.sudquotidien.sn/en-tunisie-des-migrants-arretes-et-transmis-aux-forces-libyennes-qui-les-jettent-en-prison/?amp=1</footnote>
network): "Members of a special squad lowered themselves onto their own barracks with helicopters... it's just a big show. The cops arrested those they were doing business with until yesterday. Everyone here knows the rates for Tunisians migrants: 6,000 dinars for a small boat, 25,000 dinars for a big boat. It's easy to leave, because the police and the *organizateurs* are friends, they always have been. Now everything is stuck, but it will resume. That's okay, let them round up their wages, but at least don't stop me at every check point asking me if I have a *clandestine* on board." Based on his experience as a comp-pass man and recruiter of Black passengers, Sylla also associates effective journeys with the police: "Safe convoys are the ones that are paid for before they leave; otherwise it's a gamble. For this reason, we put a bag of phones and money on the boat to be used as a gift in case of interception."

Paradoxically, police officers, soldiers, and coast guard officers, along with the migrants themselves, may be acting as No-Border subjects in the global south.<fnref n="21" /> Their corruptibility is what makes departures possible and smooth. At times, the ‘sea gate’ is shut down due to increasing arrests and interceptions determined by top-down political decisions, which is a consequence of the profits secured by the EU’s outsourcing policies. When this happens, the corridor of pushbacks, making people move backward instead of forward, becomes an alternative form of value extraction, which is also integrated with a transnational kidnapping economy—a particularly flourishing and productive industry in Libya, but a recent development in Tunisia. Thus, letting people get through and/or pushing them back are the notes of the same musical score played by state actors in Tunisia and elsewhere.<fnref n="22" />

## A Subaltern Mobility Infrastructure: Solidarity and/as Resistance Against the Pushbacks Corridor

People on the move though are not passive victims and have learned various arts of resistance (Scott 1992) to survive *removal* operations. Multiple forms of solidarity can help them to find shelter during these forced counter-movements and mitigate the suffering caused by having to live on the run. Mohammed, one of our correspondents, was the victim of his first pushback in May 2024 after a failed attempt to reach international waters from Sfax. We lost track of him for a week, until we asked an administrator of a social media channel for people on the move to post a missing person alert; in a matter of hours, dozens of comments from other victims of pushbacks and their families helped us to reconstruct his trajectory, track down his location, and get a phone contact. We caught up with Mohammed in Algeria, where he had arrived after miraculously escaping the Libyan soldiers and militias to whom he was sold by Tunisian soldiers. When we called him, he appeared in a blinding light amidst the desert dunes near El Oued. In the distance, we could see the buildings of a small village with a minaret. “The Algerians were so kind” he told us, “it was the end of Ramadan and they gave us water and food after days walking in the Libyan desert”. Behind him we saw some shacks covered with Black tarpaulin, an encampment Mohammed found there where he was staying. At each step carved out along these routes by the violence of forced mobility, markets and services linked to the passage of people on

<footnote n="21">²¹ On the role of the police, of the state, and on smuggling in the Maghreb, see (Cheikh and Pluta 2023; Gallien 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² On the case of Mauritania and Morocco, see (Cassarini and Queirolo Palmas 2024).</footnote>
the move are gradually being built along with a transnational economy of money transfers. Those who are able to pay the *passeurs'* fares can then benefit from a network of services, both essential and precarious ones, which include the possibility of making phone calls, having a roof over their heads and food. This is Mohammed's description of his overland return journey from Tebessa to Tunisia, which he described using the French term *convoi*, the same one used for sea crossings: "We left at night, there were thirty-four of us. At the border, the drivers told us to get out of the cars and we walked for three hours in the desert. It was hard, there were children and mothers with us. Before each checkpoint, we were dropped off, we walked, and then we were picked up. Now we are in a foyer in Sfax that is run by *passeurs*. Little by little, all the passengers are leaving, each one going their own way. But other deportees will soon arrive after us."

In the development of this story, one of the many we have been able to document, several layers overlap and multiple resources are activated and intertwined, thus giving rise, little by little, to a subaltern mobility infrastructure (Fig. 3). The first one is the communication infrastructure, a form of solidarity between anonymous people which holds together travelers and their families around the world. Information is a crucial resource and the common knowledge which circulates, a “mobile commons” (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013), is configured as a free, shared resource. It is a form of solidarity among equals, we could define it as a Marxian reminiscence of the solidarity of a class for itself, among subjects who are living in the same conditions and are potential victims of the same border regime operations. The second layer consists of the material infrastructure which has gradually been built alongside the corridors where pushbacks and forced mobility are enforced. This infrastructure is made up of encampments which were set up by the first deportees and used by the following generations free of charge (*inherited* in a way, and expanded through further construction later on), but it also includes the paid foyers linked to the networks managed by *passeurs* and border-crossing facilitators. Counter-movements, as resistance to state pushbacks and trafficking, are not free of charge and can involve elements of oppression, violence, and deprivation of freedom linked to the kidnapping industry, as Malcolm told us in his testimony.<fnref n="23" /> Other counter-movement practices, however, are driven by different principles: for instance, people rushing to board trains carrying minerals to cross the Algerian-Tunisian border, or people autonomously marching through the desert to escape capture by Libyan militias. The third layer is transnational solidarity, which, by connecting people on the move with their families (in Europe and in their countries of origin) or with political-humanitarian support groups, provides resources to buy the unofficial transport tickets needed to move and denounces, through the dissemination of video testimonies, the human rights violations carried out by Tunisian institutions.

These three dimensions of the subaltern infrastructure of mobility constitute the reverse of the institutional corridor of expulsions that links pushback operations in Tunisia with the kidnapping industry in Libya. Despite the escalating violence and suffering inflicted on people on the move, operated by the Tunisian state and Libyan authorities but infrastruc- tured and financed by EU externalization policies, the corridor we have described is there- fore riddled with loopholes and victims of removals continue to circulate and invent ways to exercise their right to escape (Mezzadra 2015) and cross the Mediterranean.

These three dimensions are particularly interesting as they are rooted, from a historical point of view, in the broader transformation of a migratory space over the last ten years.

<footnote n="23">²³ See: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/le-monde-africa/article/2024/01/05/sub-saharan-migrants-in-tunisia-under-threat-from-kidnapping-networks_6404641_124.html</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 3** Circulations, pushbacks and subaltern migratory infrastructures from Sfax, Tunisia, in 2024</figcaption></figure>

Indeed, the current subaltern infrastructure, which was set up by people on the move in response to changes in the border apparatus, reflects a shift in the management of forms of

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>
collective organization and solidarity from the world of associations, which were relatively visible in Sfax, to subaltern and underground worlds, the only ones capable of protecting the collective construction of routes and hidden itineraries. Historically, the informational, material, and transnational solidarity dimensions of the mobility infrastructure were openly negotiated in and tied to the worlds of humanitarian aid and development, which exploited their proximity with the migrant's community-based organizations, in order to control them more tightly. It was around these worlds, which were made up of several NGOs and IGOs, that mobility and solidarity was organized. The emergence of completely new migration management practices based on violence and coercion, and the state's violent attack on Tunisian associations and civil society organizations, had the effect of destroying the community-based associative structures. From an informational point of view, the 2023 political shift caused a local reshaping of the migrant networks, which resulted in their atomization and transnationalization. From a material point of view, community-based networks, which had historically regulated arrivals and departures in the region, have seen their prerogatives transferred to a new set of underground actors, whose transnational skills have enabled them to organize these new subaltern mobility infrastructures. These arrangements are not driven in absolute terms by any central actors or centralized structures, but rather they follow and adapt to the upheavals and turbulence which the border apparatus imposes on people on the move. These different elements help us to understand that this subaltern infrastructure of mobility functions as an assemblage of actors and principles, some solidarity-based and others commodified, some among unknown people and others involving friends and family members, which makes resistance to the pushbacks corridor possible – a concrete example of what, elsewhere, we have called impure and materialist solidarity (Bonnin et al. 2024a).

Conclusion

Through in-depth ethnographic work that began in October 2023 and is still ongoing, fed by a network of correspondents among people on the move and nourished by a historical contextualisation of migration management policies since the 2000s, this article has explored the workings and rationales of the corridor of pushbacks and the institutional infrastructure of counter-mobility in contemporary Tunisia.

The research highlighted the economic dimension of pushback operated by the secu-
rity apparatus, as a consubstantial element of the counter-mobility infrastructure. In such
a materialist perspective, the ‘removal operations’ committed by the authorities are also
ways of extracting and generating value from an asset constituted by people on the move
as humans; firstly because interceptions at sea and pushbacks to the desert are financed and
infrastructured by EU externalization policies, secondly because they seem increasingly
linked to the thriving kidnapping and prison industry in Libya, the ‘end market’ where
expelled persons, in order to get freedom, are resold at retail (to their families and friends
in solidarity, wherever they are, in Europe or Africa) or used by prison authorities and mili-
tias as captive labourers. Research correspondents refer to this asset and commodity status
by describing themselves as the *Black gold*, thus underlining the racialized dimension of
the border policies pushed by the EU at its borders (Cassarini and Queirolo Palmas (2024).

At the same time, following the turbulent trajectories of research correspondents,
between Tunisia, Libya and Algeria in search of a way to accumulate resources and be
able to take the sea route again, illuminated the existence of a subaltern infrastructure of
solidarity and mobility, the reverse of the institutional corridor of counter-mobility. In spite of the escalation of violence and suffering inflicted by the authorities on people on the move, the corridor we have described is thus riddled with loopholes, and people subjected to pushbacks continue to circulate and invent ways to exercise their right to escape by crossing the Mediterranean.

**Acknowledgements** This article is part of a research project funded by European Research Council Advanced Grant (ERC, SOLROUTES, 101053836). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

**Funding** Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Genova within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.

**Open Access** This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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