DOI: 10.5255/ukda-sn-857458
title: Ethnographic Research Data on the Criminalisation of Solidarity Work With Migrants in France and Morocco, 2022-2023

description: This ethnographic project aims to examine criminalizing and illegalizing processes targeting pro-migration activists and other citizens (e.g. volunteers, practitioners) in Morocco and France. The study investigates the competing ways in which ‘crimes of solidarity’ mobilise discourses and practices of solidarity, citizenship, and illegality in Morocco and France. The data collection examines how state repression of pro-migration activists and other ‘citizens’, who are often conflated with smugglers and accused of aiding irregular migrants, sheds light on the shifting and contested legal, moral and political boundaries between ‘irregular migrants’ and ‘citizens’. The recent focus on the figure and experience of ‘the migrant’ has enriched scholarly engagements with the construction of migrant illegality, irregular migrant political agency, and the entanglements of humanitarianism and security. Our project expands these conversations by exploring how migration politics target and affect not just migrants but also citizens. This shift is necessary in order to examine the far-reaching bordering practices and contested politics of exclusion beyond inter-state boundaries and the precarious lives of irregular migrants. We investigate how migration politics in France and Morocco are shifting the political agency and subjectivity of citizens who face (the threat of) prosecution from state authorities at the border and beyond. 

This has been achieved through participant observation and informal interviews with activists, artists, community leaders, NGO practitioners, funders, and other relevant professionals in Morocco and France. Themes discussed during conversations included : participants’ opinions about the politics of migration in Morocco/France; their history of activism and other engagement around migration; the motivations behind their engagement; the difficulties and obstacles they have faced in their activities and engagement over migration etc. 

The project has generated original insights into how hostile migration politics that selectively manage, stop, deter, and control forms of mobility also target individuals and organisations providing forms of support, assistance, aid to migrant people. The project has shed light on how state authorities in France and Morocco deploy indirect, opaque, and insidious forms of harassment to intimidate ‘subversive solidarity actors’: citizens engaging in acts of solidarity with migrant people who publicly or covertly engage in a critical stance on migration control policies and practices. This research emphasises the importance of taking the policing of solidarity actors into account to understand the policing of migration more broadly, detailing how the racist and gendered policing of migrant people bleeds into the disciplining of those who support them.
 
While attention to citizen solidarity has focused on European countries, the phenomenon is also visible in countries south of the Mediterranean. Spectacular trials have made the headlines. Our research findings shed light on the workings of less spectacular modes of criminalisation that target solidarity workers in the intimacy of their everyday lives, threatening their sense of security through opaque surveillance, attacks on their emotions, employment prospects and family life. We conceptualise this mode of criminalisation as ‘insidious harassment’, examining the entanglement of geopolitics, emotions, and the intimate at these migration pressure points. Without decentring migrants as the primary targets of violent bordering, it broadens our understanding of these regimes by drawing attention to the ways in which they viscerally target those who work to protect the rights of migrant people. The project’s findings highlight how forms of criminalisation range widely, from the explicit and physical to the intimate and psychological; from the formal to the informal, the banal to the spectacular. 

The findings reveal that states invest considerable resources - money, human resources (official & unofficial) and time - in seeking to inflict a sense of constant surveillance and discomfort on solidarity actors. Many of the people we spoke to suspected that these indirect and opaque forms of state violence represent a way to protect the appearance and reputation of these states as rights-respecting, while in fact they pursue a dedicated campaign of trying to harass migrant people and those who support them into submission. The effects of insidious harassment are multiple: they are financial, administrative, emotional, psychological, physical and sometimes legal. Beyond just impacting practices of solidarity, they work to target solidarity actors on a moral and on practical levels, with repercussions on their work, family and social lives. This constitutes a protracted and everyday pressure that often works to disrupt solidarity actors’ sense of safety within and trust of the authorities and nation state. However, achieving an overview and in-depth understanding of these modes of policing and how they play out may contribute to reducing these effects. This research project has also shed light on how in contexts where repression is constantly squeezed and solidarity actors face damaging state practices, their commitment to rectifying social injustices and wrongs is also galvanised.