Inhabiting humanitarian borderscapes: claiming rights and organizing dissent in post-2011 southeastern Tunisia

ABSTRACT

Since 2011, the evolving dynamics of the Libyan civil war combined with the EU’s efforts to delegate sea patrolling in the Central Mediterranean to Libyan entities, resulted in Tunisia witnessing a surge in border crossings through Libya. This article argues that southeastern Tunisia consequently morphed into a humanitarian borderscape, where the personnel of International Organizations and their partner NGOs entrusted with the assistance and protection of mobile populations, de facto contributed to border enforcement. Based on interviews and informal conversations conducted in 2018 and 2019 with Tunisian NGOs, local institutional actors, national and international activists, refugees, asylum seekers, and irregularized migrants, this contribution demonstrates how such a metamorphosis impacted spontaneous solidarity networks that emerged post-2011. It also illuminates tensions and disruptions experienced by both borderland citizens and displaced individuals, particularly from Northeast Africa, as they negotiate an active presence within these altered border dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanitarianism
• borders
• borderscapes
• Northeast Africa
• Tunisia
• Libya
• mobilities
• solidarity
• externalization

Over the past few decades, scholars engaged in African Studies,¹ critical migration, borders and refugee studies² have extensively examined how (re)structuring diverse and localized forms of solidarity and hospitality through the international standards of humanitarian intervention has resulted in their collusion with border (re)enforcement, surveillance, securitization, and militarization, all while being instrumental to the EU efforts for externalizing its southern borders into Africa.³

The collusion of humanitarianism with border management is all but exclusive to the African continent. The discipline of human rights and the ‘humanitarian reason’⁴ were historically articulated building blocks of the European identity in the aftermath of World War II, accounting for the emergence of a new style of governance of international spaces. Humanitarian borderwork became the trademark of European security policies at its external borders⁵ as the EU enacted ‘humanitarian principles […] concerned with securing lives’ to disguise ‘older forms of borderwork concerned with stopping [people on the move], defending and securing territory’.⁶

Furthermore, contemporary EU attempts at externalizing its borders’ controls onto the continent have systematically leveraged the (re)production of the ‘humanitarian reason’ and the ‘refugification’ of mobilities in and from Africa to legitimate its interest in pursuing the ‘indirect government of socio-political processes in Africa’.⁷ This has led many scholars to retrace the colonial origins of contemporary refugee issues in the continent and beyond.⁸ Observing how these processes currently unfold across a number of African borderscapes producing veritable social worlds, therefore, fundamentally contributes to wider intellectual inquiries into the continent’s past, present, and possible future. In fact, as aptly underlined by the contribution opening this special issue, addressing the social worlds emerging from past and present mobility regimes provides precious insights into the (un)making of contemporary (East) African societies and their political dynamics.

This article contributes an exploration of how humanity and humanitarianism actively concur to (re)bordering processes right where the Global South intersects with the EU external borders, namely in the Central Mediterranean Neighbourhood. By embracing African Refugee studies’ call for abandoning ‘the colonial gaze that pathologizes perpetually African refugees’ as well as African citizens, and situating instead the processes unfolding on the ground within ‘exploitative global, colonial, and neo-colonial systems of power and knowledge production’⁹, it shows how post-2011 southeastern Tunisia constituted the privileged locus for novel experimentation of EU-African humanitarian borderwork in the larger Mediterranean.

After popular protests erupted in the country in December 2010, demanding freedom and dignity and paving the way for the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, Tunisia arguably became a ‘migratory space where different struggles for movement, technologies of government, and displacements of the condition of “being precarized” come into being and intersect’.¹⁰ Due to the high number of irregularized border crossings triggered by the combination of the ongoing post-Ben ‘Ali socio-political reconfiguration, on the one hand, and the subsequent evolutions of the Libyan uprising into civil war on the other, a few towns along the frontier with Libya witnessed unprecedented humanitarian intervention. The EU and EU member states’ instruments of international cooperation proved key in supporting such an intervention, which also leveraged the active involvement of some portions of the Tunisian civil society in the provision of aid to international migrant persons, asylum seekers, and refugees.¹¹

People inhabiting these borderlands – being the mobile populations, local citizens and institutions, or humanitarian practitioners – negotiated humanitarian borderscaping with both national and local cultures of hospitality and mobility, which are not necessarily devoid of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. Given that Northeast Africa (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, and South Sudan) and some areas of West Africa such as the Ivory Coast are commonly considered as ‘refugee-producing’ countries¹², the implementation of procedures informed by the humanitarian reason made mobile persons originating from these areas being automatically categorized as potential refugees in Tunisia, similar to those escaping the Syrian civil war. Hence, all these nationalities were channeled into the local infrastructure of asylum, which – as it will be discussed in detail – is entrusted to UNHCR and its partner associations. And yet, differential hospitality cultures led to diverse trajectories for Syrian refugees as compared to those experienced by Ivorian or Northeast Africans, especially as far as the collusion between securitarian logics and the provision of humanitarian aid is concerned.

Combining the accounts of members of the Tunisian civil society, national and international activists, as well as refugees and asylum seekers, this contribution affords novel insights into the intersection between the geographies of Euro-African displacement and the enforcement of new technologies of migration management through the provision of humanitarian aid in southeastern Tunisia. It also accounts for the peculiar forms of civic activism that emerged along a borderzone traditionally considered peripheral, and illuminates how refugees-in-the-making, especially from Northeast Africa, strived for political subjectivity by either building or entering meaningful relationships¹³ with individuals or group actors interacting with and within these spaces of humanitarianism. It will emerge that Africans (both Tunisians and non-Tunisians) consistently behaved as (counter)agents rather than mere subjects of the humanitarian reason.

Methodology

This contribution relies on a thorough desk analysis of published materials, along with insights gathered from semi-structured interviews and detailed notes taken during informal conversations with research partners I met between the summer of 2018 and the summer of 2019 in various Tunisian locations, including Tunis, Sfax, Medenine, Jarjis, and Benguardane.

Fieldwork was undertaken both in preparation for and within the scope of a larger collaborative research project examining how the 2015 launching of the European Agenda on Migration, and the subsequent introduction of the Hotspot Approach, reconfigured both the physical and immaterial nodes of the EU infrastructure of migration management.¹⁴ The project also explored whether and how the logic underpinning the implementation of the Hotspot Approach in Europe affected the multilevelling of migration management beyond European spatialities, namely through EU economic support to the Mediterranean Neighbourhood aimed at enhancing the coalescing of national and non-national, state, and non-state actors in border management. Hence, the interest in documenting the practices and procedures of filtering and disaggregating so-called ‘mixed migratory flows’ at the Tunisian-Libyan border.

Around 30 research partners participated in the research, engaging in either formal and recorded semi-structured interviews or informal conversations, the details of which were meticulously documented through extensive notetaking. Initially, I focused on sampling representatives from Tunisian NGOs active in migration and human rights, the Tunisian Red Crescent, independent journalists, and national and international activists advocating for human rights, particularly freedom of movement. These individuals were identified during desk analysis.

To provide a diverse perspective on the functioning and impact of humanitarian borderwork along the Tunisian-Libyan frontier, I also contacted refugees, asylum seekers, and irregularized migrants. Site visits to centers’ surroundings in the border governorate of Medenine and referrals from other interviewees facilitated these connections. After discussing with the research team and in recognition of the vulnerability of this population – especially considering the potential risks associated with participating in research on a system that contributed to rendering them vulnerable – I limited formal interviews to individuals who had secured refugee status. After providing comprehensive information on the study’s objectives, these individuals chose the interview setting they deemed most suitable and secure. The perspectives of asylum seekers and irregularized migrants were only collected in cases where they spontaneously approached me during site visits and expressed their interest in sharing their insights on my research topic. Additionally, such interactions occurred with individuals who had already previously engaged with researchers or journalists, assuming the role of spokespersons for what they recognized as their community.

Due to the aforementioned sampling criteria and considering that, during the fieldwork period, citizens from Northeast African countries were the third most represented group of refugees and asylum seekers in Tunisia, following Syrians and Ivorian citizens,¹⁵ they unintentionally became the predominant group among my migrant interview partners. Their accounts on the functioning of the humanitarian interventions they had been exposed to, as well as the ways they coordinated with other refugees and asylum seekers, and local and international activists to claim rights, provided key insights into how an emergent humanitarian borderscape at the Tunisian-Libyan border contributed to the ‘forging of contemporary African communities’ documented elsewhere in the continent.¹⁶ Moreover, they attested to how humanitarian intervention exists to concomitantly ensure and undermine fundamental human rights.

My argument proceeds as follows. First, I trace how the country’s southeastern borderzones morphed into humanitarian borderscapes and with which implications. I contend this metamorphosis happened due to an unprecedented protagonism of humanitarian actors in combining ‘the “transition to democracy” discourse that flourished in revolutionized Tunisia’¹⁷ with the implementation of an arguably effective mode of governing migrants’ circulation within and out of the country.

I then discuss how the emergence of a humanitarian borderscape at the Tunisian-Libyan border contributed to welding the rationalization of solidarity performed by Tunisian citizens in the country’s southeastern governorates¹⁸ to the subsequent disciplining of activities promoted by the Tunisian civil society in the field of refugee assistance.¹⁹ I argue that the combination of these two processes resulted in both citizens and mobile persons being disciplined through the provision of minimal resources and care, or their withholding altogether. Meanwhile, border crossers of particular nationalities were automatically labelled and socially constructed as refugees, which resulted in portraying them as perpetual victims and passive subjects, thus depoliticizing their individual trajectories of migration. Conversely, whenever they individually acted or collectively organized as political subjectivities and right-bearing persons, they were treated as inconvenient and unwanted guests.

Lastly, drawing on testimonies of research partners from Northeast Africa, I show how, despite adversities and constraints, protection seekers organize to claim rights, voicing dissent, and denouncing the abuses resulting from the very humanitarian reason that exposes them to further cycles of suffering, exclusion, and subsequent vulnerabilization. And yet, to make the most out of the limited possibilities of mobilization afforded to them by their precarious legal status in Tunisia, these protection seekers end up performing refugeeness as the main source of their political subjectivity, with the risk of paradoxically perpetuating the very logic of human categorization on which their exclusion is predicated.

Humanitarian borderscaping along the Tunisian-Libyan frontier

In early 2011, inspired by the newfound freedoms resulting from the revolutionary momentum, some 28.000 young Tunisians interpreted the fall of the Ben ‘Ali regime–which was believed to be a historic opportunity for the radical reconceiving of the country’s political and institutional landscape– as a chance to resort to (temporarily) unrestricted mobility to Europe’.²⁰ Meanwhile, by March 2011, escalating violence in Libya displaced around 1.500.000 people, which were all welcomed by southeastern Tunisia’s historically marginalized border governorates.²¹

Tunisian transitional authorities decided to organize the reception and initial processing of significant numbers of displaced individuals right at the border, namely in the provinces of Medenine and, to a lesser extent, Tataouine, which were structurally unequipped to provide prompt response to massive numbers of people in need. This played a crucial role in channeling the rhetoric of the migration crisis along the Tunisian-Libyan frontier. Much like in Europe, individuals escaping the Libyan conflict remained stuck in processing activities for extended periods. The situation contributed to heightened anxiety regarding the management of population movements in transitional Tunisia, justifying an unprecedented humanitarian intervention in the region.

Indeed, transitional authorities initially decided to adopt an open-door policy towards mobile populations, as this was consistent with the emerging nexus between revolutionary ideals and the claim for freedom of movement.²² Displaced persons from Libya were hosted in temporary camps set up in Remada, Dahiba, Tataouine, al-Hayet, and Medenine, or by Tunisian families that self-organized under the coordination of the Red Crescent for providing reception and assistance to people fleeing the Libyan conflict.²³ The self-organized movement in solidarity with escapees from Libya, however, was soon replaced by a concerted and EU-sponsored humanitarian intervention according to which most individuals and families informally hosted in Tunisian households were redirected to the proximities of the Ras Jdir frontier post, where the Shousha refugee camp was set up by the Tunisian Army and the Red Crescent as of 24 February 2011.²⁴

Therefore, albeit conceived for a maximum capacity of 2.000 persons, the camp had to host up to 15,000 persons.²⁵ Its staggering expansion saw the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) acquiring a key role, respectively in registering an overall 4670 asylum requests and organizing the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) of all those who did not apply for asylum (around 400,000 persons only between March and April). Both organizations arranged the resettlement of an estimated 2,000 persons who had applied for asylum before December 2011 and were recognized as refugees. A number of international nongovernmental organizations were also involved in the humanitarian activities promoted in and around Shousha. Meanwhile, local citizens who had started spontaneously volunteering to assist displaced persons at the border were hired and trained by humanitarian organizations. This resulted in absorbing their individual and group efforts into an increasingly professionalized and centrally coordinated form of intervention.

Only 3,500 persons were eventually recognized as asylum seekers, after status verification procedures that lasted more than eighteen months.²⁶ During this period, the Tunisian Army was entrusted with the provision of security to the area, and asylum seekers were de facto detained within Shousha camp, whose control was soon taken over by UNHCR in coordination with the Danish Refugee Council.²⁷ The observed positive correlation between North African regime changes and increasing migration within and from the region exposed the failure of the EU’s early 2000s strategy of combining an anticipatory governance of migrations through compliant authoritarian regimes with mainstreaming neoliberal economic policies and curbing the expansion of Islamist movements.²⁸

To make sure post-Ben 'Ali Tunisia would resume control over migratory inflows supposedly headed to Europe across the Central Mediterranean, the EU and its member states leveraged the European Civil Protection Mechanism to financially, logistically, and politically sponsor unprecedented coordination between Tunisian national security authorities, the IOM and UNHCR, and their partner NGOs. These actors were tasked with ‘needs assessments and the evacuation/repatriation of Third Country Nationals who had fled violence in Libya’, but they were also provided with ‘aerial and sea transportation and funding for transport assets’.²⁹ Meanwhile, Tunisian transitional authorities’ decision not to put the approval of the asylum law among the country’s priorities attested to the state’s declining of any responsibility for the provision of protection to asylum seekers. Conversely, the responsibilization of civil society in aid provision disguised alternative ways of controlling irregular mobilities that added to and supported more traditional border checks.³⁰

From ‘promoting a pedagogy of the refugee issue’ to ‘direct engagement in the field’

To understand the interplay between the humanitarian governance of the Tunisian-Libyan borderscapes and the ‘refugee situation’ in contemporary Tunisia, one needs to consider its emergent embeddedness in the political history of the country. Indeed, associating non-governmental organizations, humanitarian organizations, and civil society groups in migration control is by no means a new phenomenon, for the post-colonial state had already used migration as a ‘device of political regulation’.³¹ The country ratified the Geneva Convention as early as June 1955. After obtaining independence, Tunisian authorities committed to the UN to respect the Convention as soon as 1957. The Constitution of June 1959 prohibited the extradition of individuals persecuted for political offenses (Article 17) but no national legislation was passed to regulate the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.

UNHCR was entrusted with the reception and status verification of asylum seekers. Yet, it could only operate by relying on the cooperation of the Red Crescent offices active in the country. In fact, it was not until 1992 that it managed to sign an official agreement with the Tunisian government and accordingly establish its headquarters in Tunis.³² Ever since, UNHCR started associating a few Tunisian NGOs to the PARinAC (Partnership in Action) process on the issue of Refugees in Africa, which was launched in the aftermath of the 1994 Oslo Symposium, involving around 183 NGOs from 83 countries. A Plan of Action – later renewed in 2000 – sanctioned the reinforcement of UNHCR-NGO partnerships on issues such as ‘protection, internally displaced persons, emergency preparedness and response, and the relief-development continuum in all parts of the world’.³³ Accordingly, both UNHCR and NGOs’ role on refugee-related issues started exceeding ‘humanitarian efforts’ as they also engaged in promoting ‘human rights, early warning, prevention, reconciliation and peacekeeping and peacemaking’.³⁴

Therefore, international humanitarian organizations, together with their local partner NGOs, were responsible for all interventions targeting refugees and asylum seekers already in Ben 'Ali’s Tunisia. The number of refugees never exceeded the hundred back then, as set by national authorities to convey the image of a country hostile to refugee reception.³⁵ Moreover, both international humanitarian organizations and NGOs were subjected to the capillary control of the regime, which presented all issues related to migration as state matters.³⁶

Starting from 2011, the framing of the revolution-international mobilities binomial turned so-called ‘sub-Saharan’ immigration into an issue to be included in the country’s public debate, together with the issue of Tunisian emigration to Europe.³⁷ National authorities showed a persistent interest in maintaining control over their sea and land borders, profiting from EU operational, technical, and financial support in patrolling activities, which ultimately remained under the Tunisian Coastguard’s and National Guard’s competencies. Meanwhile, an increasing number of non-governmental actors identified their ‘social field’ of action in activities related to the human rights-immigration nexus.³⁸

A plethora of intermediaries and decentralized organizations were thus created, which the EU successfully associated with its strategies for outsourcing migration control in the Central Mediterranean while mainstreaming its border regime.³⁹ This served to mobilize Tunisian citizens for the ultimate purpose of controlling population movements to, throughout, and out of Tunisian territory.⁴⁰ And yet, the citizens-led policing of borders was concealed by the rhetoric of human rights safeguarding and democracy building, which came to constitute the trademark of the Tunisian transition more broadly, and in ways that have been rightly problematized.⁴¹

This shows that – similarly to what Andersson documented for mobility control dynamics unfolding between West Africa, Morocco, and Spain, investing in advanced border controls and alimenting anxiety about securing the border was not a merely repressive process but a rather productive one in Tunisia as well.⁴² It served state authorities to obtain international financial support in exchange for resuming and tightening controls over (unwanted) mobilities. Moreover, it succeeded in disciplining alternative and less structured forms of solidarity by (re)organizing them into sets of procedures conforming to the neoliberal humanitarian governance of population movements.⁴³

As confirmed by the director of the Arab Institute for Human Rights (AIHR) – one of UNHCR’s key partners that had also joined in the PARinAC process – some portions of the Tunisian civil society saw their role in the refugee issues both dramatically increasing and qualitatively changing:

With the help of the High Commissioner for Refugees, [in the 1990s] we started to develop the capacities of Tunisian NGOs and to train them on the issue of refugees. […] We succeeded in developing a pedagogy of the refugee issue as a human rights issue. After 2011, things changed and developed, so that we played a bigger role. […] We founded an office in southern Tunisia […] So, we went from refugee rights promotion to direct engagement in the field.⁴⁴

Until 2010, UNHCR cooperation with the few NGOs that were allowed to mobilize as a civil society under Ben 'Ali’s regime essentially entailed capacity building through the production and promotion of specific repertoires on the refugee issue. In the aftermath of the revolution, these repertoires were mobilized to organize direct engagement in the areas of the country where displaced persons first entered the Tunisian territory. This resulted in vulgarizing very specific categories of thought consistent with the ‘reigning orthodoxy as to how migration and asylum seeking should be addressed, framed and understood’.⁴⁵ Namely, through constructs such as ‘economic migrants’; ‘bogus asylum seekers’; ‘illegal bordered crossings’, and ‘refugees’.

A knowledge reservoir developed in the mid-1990s was operationalized through the direct involvement of Tunisian NGOs in streamlining the humanitarian logistics along the Tunisian-Libyan border. The southeastern governorate of Medenine was consequently wired into the globally deterritorialized governance of mobile persons pursued by the Global North, among other things, through supporting humanitarian actors entrusted with labeling refugees and, by extension, (unwanted) mobile persons excluded by this category.⁴⁶

Humanitarianism as social sorting

Consistently with the emergency rhetoric that informed the Tunisian public debate on cross-border displacement and migration in the aftermath of the North African regime changes, the setting up of the Shousha camp was intended as a temporary solution. Hence, in June 2013, around the time the Zaydan government started operating in Tripoli after the first political elections were held in post-Gaddafi’s Libya, the camp was officially closed. Hundreds of people decided not to leave the camp in protest for the ‘non-solutions’ offered by the Tunisian Government and UNHCR to those labeled as ‘not-of-concern’.⁴⁷ Yet, electrical and water services to the area were interrupted. This situation lasted until June 2017, when Shousha was evacuated by the Tunisian army and Security Forces.⁴⁸

Meanwhile, following the 2014 reigniting of the Libyan civil war, southern Tunisia witnessed a new wave of sustained displacement from Libya. What in 2011 seemed to be a temporary phenomenon, became a constant trend. The 2015 Valletta Summit and the 2016 New York Declaration on the Global Governance of Migration further confirmed EU and UN efforts in sponsoring humanitarian actors to enforce border policing. Tunisia received 57 million euros from the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), the majority of which was conditional to the implementation of border management and migration control actions (67%), including building the capacity of Tunisian authorities in the governance of migration (additional 15%).⁴⁹

Within the scope of the EUNAVFOR Med (European Union Naval Force in the South Central Mediterranean) operation, the EU Commission offered new training opportunities to the Libyan Coastguard since June 2016. The increasing maritime interceptions ensuing from these evolutions pushed many prospective candidates to the Mediterranean crossing to embark on their perilous journey from southeastern Tunisia instead of Lybia. Therefore, the EU also started investing in reinforcing the Tunisian coastguard’s technical capacities and equipment.

Between 2016 and 2018, the percentage of non-Tunisian irregularized migrants intercepted at sea by Tunisian authorities rose from 9% to 11%, as compared to the 3% to 5% registered until 2015. In 2019 this figure reached 33%.⁵⁰ The Italian-Libyan Memorandum of Understanding was signed in February 2017. In June 2018, the Italian Ministry of Interior decided to discontinue coordinated sea patrolling and SAR activities in international waters. Shortly thereafter, Tripoli notified the International Maritime Organization of the creation of a Libyan SAR zone, which was recognized as legitimate and operative.

These evolutions led to more border crossings from Libya into Tunisia. New arrivals were then directed to a reception center for ‘mixed migration’ operated in Medenine by the local branch of Tunisian Red Crescent, back then UNHCR’s and IOM’s main partner in the governorate.⁵¹ A multilevel network of procedures and decision-making was set in motion to disaggregate so-called “mixed migratory inflows” through the concerted involvement of governmental, non-governmental, and intergovernmental actors at the Tunisian-Libyan border. Channeling millions of euros of humanitarian support towards an until then scarcely controlled state border resulted in putting it on the agenda of a multicentered global system of power and authority, turning it into a no-more-so-marginal and no-more-so-uncontrolled borderzone.

The training activities on migration-related issues organized by humanitarian international organizations and their local partner NGOs proved key for instating an ‘ontology of alterity’⁵² that did not erase but curtailed alternative forms of solidarity. Public Security officers – both from the Tunisian Coastguard and the National Guard – and NGO employees were instructed on how to identify asylum seekers and vulnerable cases while distinguishing them from so-called economic migrants already from the moment they were detected crossing the border.

The way the director of the Arab Institute for Human Rights office for the South described the chain of procedures humanitarian actors implement in response to new arrivals in the governorate of Medenine, clearly shows how the provision of aid and protection increasingly blurred with the logic of population movements’ control:

The National Army usually intercepts irregular border crossers along the frontier zone of Ras Jdir and then brings them to the National Guard’s posts in Ben Guardane. There, officers identify and fingerprint intercepted persons while also starting a preliminary inquiry on their nationality, why they were in Libya, and why they crossed the border. […] Meanwhile, UNHCR and IOM are alerted, together with the NGOs operating in the field for providing aid and legal assistance to irregular migrants and asylum seekers. […] Newly arrived persons are transferred to the Ben Guardane offices of the Red Crescent. […] All undergo a preliminary health check and case assessment intended to immediately disaggregate potential asylum seekers from irregular migrants. Those who express their interest in applying for asylum will be then brought to UNHCR offices. Those who do not want to apply for asylum in Tunisia will be transferred instead to the IOM-operated reception center in Medenine.⁵³

It emerges that authorities traditionally entrusted with border control and usually tasked with keeping illegalized people out of the Tunisian territory are now expected to also guarantee border crossers’ safety. Meanwhile, through their active involvement in sorting out procedures, humanitarian actors officially entrusted with the provision of care and protection support border policing rather than people in need.

The line gets increasingly blurred between civil society activism and governmental or intergovernmental interests at stake in the process, as the provision of care by humanitarian actors indirectly enhances state control over irregularized border crossers as well as border regions as such. When asked to define the relationship between humanitarian actors and public authorities in the field of migrants’ reception, the head of the Medenine branch of the Tunisian Red Crescent answered:

We are auxiliaries of the public power. […] We have sometimes received people who had arrived without being seen by the authorities. But we can’t accept someone who is not registered [with them] … we must hand [those who have crossed the border undetected] over to the security agencies so that they can check their situation … it’s very important to have security, it’s above all … otherwise, we are screwed!⁵⁴

Informal conversations with persons from Darfur, South Sudan, and Somalia substantiated this is indeed a typical procedure. However, these conversations also uncovered how, after humanitarian actors initiate such a referral mechanism, the Tunisian National Guard often resorts to migrant pushbacks into Libyan territory.⁵⁵ This suggests that humanitarian actors have become increasingly concerned with the security of Tunisian borders to the detriment of protection seekers.

Disciplining solidarity and depoliticizing asylum seekers

Albeit considered functional to channel newly arrived persons to the procedures that allegedly are the most appropriate to their cases, early sorting out of so-called mixed migration ultimately serves to keep the accordingly categorized mobile persons ‘distant-while-proximate’ to local citizens.⁵⁶ Translating the values and principles underpinned by the international discipline of human rights into concrete and standardized practices for migrants’ reception and case assessments, the training activities administered to both Tunisian NGOs and law enforcement authorities overall succeed in framing joint policing operations in the language of humanitarianism. Meanwhile, by engaging with the humanitarian sector, previously disenfranchised border citizens are afforded novel dimensions of citizenship for they can embody a sense of ‘rightfulness’ in stark contrast to the ‘rightlessness’ experienced by the mobile population stuck alongside them at the border. Such a humanitarian intervention enforces a regulatory understanding of the refugee notion based on the nationality criterion and the refugee recognition rate.

Within this process, an interview partner clearly described how newly arrived persons from Syria and some areas of Northeast Africa are typically ‘constructed’ as a priori asylum seekers because of their nationality:

[Border] officers underwent training on human rights and the international asylum regime we organize in partnership with UNHCR, as well as on human trafficking. They know that Syrians, Eritreans, and people from certain regions of Somalia, and South Sudan are among the nationalities with the highest rate of asylum recognition. These persons will be automatically asked if they want to apply for asylum.⁵⁷

The histories and living situations of individuals captured by the abstract categories of ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘economic migrants’ become less and less relevant, as the possibility of claiming refuge essentially depends on their cases’ compliance with normative notions of vulnerability, and national or ethnic authenticity. This mirrors the unfolding and functioning of other humanitarian borderscapes described elsewhere in the continent.⁵⁸ Repurposed as spatial–temporal sites solely devoted to bureaucratic procedures of categorization, status verification, and recognition, localities particularly exposed to humanitarian intervention actively contribute to the mainstreaming of essentialist and ahistorical notions of identity through prior-to-discourse understandings of what a ‘real refugee’ should be as opposed to a citizen.

Since the humanitarian borderscapes they come to be a constitutive part of recognize them as universally in need of protection, while concomitantly alienating them from local political subjectivity, refugees are framed as – and indeed risk becoming – helpless victims to be rescued, and passive objects of humanitarian intervention.⁵⁹

The role of liminal reception in humanitarian borderscaping

If newly codified reception procedures serve to associate non-governmental humanitarian actors in border policing, peculiar reception conditions serve to discipline migrants instead, while discouraging the emergence of alternative forms of solidarity. This also leverages local cultures of hospitality that are not immune from racism, nationalism, and xenophobia. Northeast Africans are treated as asylum seekers by default, on the same footing as Syrians. However, the Tunisian public’s perceived affinity with the latter, driven by both linguistic and religious connections, facilitates the delivery of aid and support to Syrian refugees. The enduring influence of pan-Arab nationalism, indeed, mitigates xenophobia. Moreover, Syrian refugees’ displacement is understood as a consequence of their involvement in the broader revolutionary momentum associated with the so-called ‘Arab Springs’, of which Tunisians consider themselves the regional champions. These aspects led to an ideal alignment between the Tunisian public and the Syrian displaced, which made it easier for humanitarian organizations to resort to forms of reception entailing the rental of independent apartments from private individuals, both in the governorates of southeastern Tunisia and the capital.

Asylum seekers from Northeast Africa were also forced to enter Tunisia through its remote and weakly controlled southeastern borders as a result of the revolutionary momentum of 2010 and 2011. Namely, when Libya – until then the key hub of the regional migration sub-system and their country of first asylum⁶⁰ – was overtaken by civil war. However, since their presence in Libya was largely understood as a result of Gaddafi’s pan-African turn of the 1990s⁶¹, the anti-regime uprising was never considered as their revolution. Once in Tunisia, they were immediately channeled through forms of humanitarian reception and aid that were importantly informed by the intersection of global and local forms of anti-black racism as well as xenophobia, whose historicity unfolds across the (re)production of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial identity constructs on Tunisia and the Maghreb region at large.⁶² Extremely precarious reception conditions proved instrumental to further alienating them from local citizens’ sympathy and support.

In 2018, increasing arrivals from Libya led to the fast overcrowding of the Medenine reception center for ‘mixed migration’. Several cases of Tuberculosis were recorded among the residents, whose reception was managed through unsufficient provisions of aid, if not its withholding alltogether. This led to turmoil and fights, both among the inhabitants of the center and with the local community.⁶³ As a result, the structure was closed on 8 April 2019.⁶⁴ UNHCR and IOM, who operated reception centers to host asylum seekers and refugees separately from persons categorized as ‘irregular migrants’, then opted to disperse their presence across Jarjis and Medenine. In addition to the Ibn Khaldoun center in Medenine, UNHCR opened two smaller centres in Jarjis – one called Zaytoun and the other labeled as Route de Ben Guardane centre. People registered with IOM started being hosted for a maximum of 60 days in the Route de Djerba centre for adult males of Medenine, which was eventually also closed for tensions with the neighborhood in August 2019. Minors and single women not considered eligible for asylum were hosted instead in a dedicated center operated in Medenine not far from UNHCR’s Ibn Khaldoun centre.⁶⁵

Several interviews and conversations with displaced populations, local authorities, and NGOs, described the reception conditions offered to refugees, asylum seekers, and other irregularized migrants in the governorate of Medenine as undignified and actively contributing to worsening their physical and mental health.⁶⁶ When some of the persons housed in the IOM-operated shelter for male adults in Medenine invited me and some colleagues to enter the premises, we were confronted with a building still under construction, without connections to running water or electricity in the scorching August heat. We were told around 200 people lived there, sleeping on mattresses lying on the floor, in rooms that lacked any kind of furniture, but also in the corridors, and even on the stair landings of the building. Some of them were able to show us documents proving they had eventually registered with UNHCR, hoping to obtain more substantial forms of aid.⁶⁷

This would prove the assessment of a research partner according to whom unbearable living conditions in reception centers are not haphazard but rather constitute one of the strategic tools IOM utilizes to convince those categorized as ‘irregular migrants’ to apply for Assisted Voluntary Return to their country of origin. The same interlocutor explained how individuals categorized as prospective asylum seekers are often housed in IOM-operated centers because they decline to apply for asylum in Tunisia. In that case, given the substantial challenges associated with organizing their repatriation to countries commonly labeled as ‘refugee-producing’, offering undignified reception serves IOM’s strategic interest to persuade these people to register with UNHCR instead.⁶⁸

And yet, an asylum seeker from Eritrea explained living conditions are precarious in UNHCR-operated centers as well. Moreover, serious barriers to accessing healthcare and other social services also contribute to making asylum seeker and refugee lives unfold at the impossible intersection between rightfulness and rightlessness. On the one hand, shelters provided by humanitarian organizations de facto allow asylum seekers and refugees not to fall into conditions of homelessness. On the other hand, the very fact of being included in the system of humanitarian protection ends up excluding them from the local socio-political life.⁶⁹

UNHCR procedures are essentially in English or French, with some provision of interpretation in Arabic. Yet, most of us are not fluent in either of these languages. […] When we ask for medical treatment, they simply do not respond or tell us we shall pay ourselves for medication. But we cannot work here, and we do not have money to buy medications.⁷⁰

Other research partners explained insufficient provision of food and healthcare are among the factors that isolate asylum seekers and refugees from the local population:

There is already a lot of racism here against us, and they [UNHCR personnel] aggravate our position. […] They spread rumors that we are sick with TBC and AIDS … Now those who approached the center to help us, and the friends that some of us made just by walking around the city […] do not want to meet with us anymore. […] Most taxi drivers no longer want to drive us to the market because they are afraid of getting ill. They [UNHCR] want to isolate us […]. The way they manage the center forces us to become a problem for the neighborhood. They only occasionally bring us prepaid cards for food, which is not enough for us to survive. […] Some people helped us, but some others were extremely annoyed by our requests for help for they are also poor, and they think we already have money from UNHCR and want to profit from their charity.⁷¹

Commenting on these issues, the representative of the Arab Institute for Human Rights for the South blamed especially asylum seekers from the ‘Horn of Africa’ for ‘profiting’ from the fact of originating from a country with a high asylum recognition rate ‘to constantly complain’ and express their grievances ‘aggressively’, thereby creating ‘lots of problems’ for humanitarian actors handling their cases and ‘provoking’ national security authorities’ reaction.⁷² In the same vein, Jarjis mayor explained that the local population did not enter conflicts with the migrant population per se, but rather with asylum seekers and refugees, especially those from Northeast Africa, which according to him would ‘constantly create troubles’ and ‘always ask for more than they give back’ to the local community.⁷³

These testimonies attest to how local authorities and humanitarian NGOs do not contemplate the possibility for migrants to claim rights other than the inadequate protection that is administered to them as a form of charity for which they are expected to show unconditional gratitude, regardless of how limited and undignified it might be. The flattening of humanitarian categorizations on the criterion of nationalities with high or low recognition rates facilitates most Northeast African nationals in claiming asylum and even obtaining refugee status. However, the fact of being recognized as refugees in a country that does not have a law on asylum ultimately devoid refuge of its protection attributes, and only function as a dispositive of social control.

Rather than providing protection, humanitarian interventions that function as bordering technologies materialize an alternative to more traditional forms of carcerality. By irregularizing migrants on the spot or postponing status recognition of potential asylum seekers through never-ending status verification procedures, humanitarian actors effectively contribute to the impairment of these populations’ mobilities. Conversely, anytime humanitarian interventions fail in disciplining and controlling those deemed ‘unwanted’ or ‘undeserving’ of protection, law-enforcement authorities are alerted and resort to measures restrictive of personal freedom against immigrants, confirming the carceral dimension of southeastern Tunisia’s humanitarian borderscape. This explains why most asylum seekers do not want to be recognized as refugees in Tunisia or, once they are, relentlessly claim the right to relocation in Europe or the Global North. As an interview partner put it: ‘Even Tunisia lives of international aid, and Tunisians flee their country. Why should I want to stay here?’.⁷⁴

Challenging the humanitarian gaze

Mobile persons – being them irregularized migrants, asylum seekers, or refugees – seldom comply with the passivizing logic underpinned by the humanitarian reason that purports them as perennial objects of organized forms of aid and institutionalization. On the contrary, as the testimonies show, they struggle to break isolation and make their voices heard, even when this means becoming troublesome interlocutors for local and international actors entrusted with providing them with services and protection. This can entail some of them mobilizing to negotiate refugeeness beyond the humanitarian gaze, and thus resist the precarization they encounter while undergoing humanitarian processing.

Most of the time, one of the ways to effectively make their voices heard is for mobile persons subjected to the international regimes of borders and asylum to reach out to local and international activists for the freedom of movement, while also talking to researchers and journalists. Indeed, political mobilizations have also emerged in Tunisia that include asylum seekers and acknowledge their political subjectivity. Usually organized in polemics with humanitarian actors, these initiatives denounced their complicity with border policing and police repression. This was the case of the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights (FTDES) reporting activities on the state of migrants’ reception in the Governorate of Medenine⁷⁵, which led to the closing of the first reception center for mixed migratory flows in the city of Medenine.

FTDES also entered a fruitful collaboration with the MigrEurop network to conduct an in-depth study of the migration policies enforced in Tunisia from 2015 on, which were denounced as ‘non-reception’ policies.⁷⁶ Both organizations joined forces with international advocacy initiatives for migrants’ rights such as the Shabaka&Oruka project. Launched by the Italian lawyers and legal experts’ association, ASGI, the initiative engages ‘in strategic litigation, through partnerships with African civil society, to counter human rights violations stemming from funding and implementation of border externalization policies’.⁷⁷ Closer to the border, in the port town of Jarjis, different groups and individuals organized ‘to provide dignity’ to the Mediterranean victims of the European border regimes, by fixing a local cemetery for unidentified migrants that stands for ‘both the deadly effects of migration policies and the compassion of simple citizens in the face of horror’.⁷⁸

Informal collectives of European and Tunisian activists for the freedom of movement, including a few independent journalists operating in Tunis and Medenine, also repeatedly denounced illegal pushbacks and pre-charge detention of asylum seekers or irregular migrants. Similar initiatives have also involved the Tunisian association al-Ard li-l-jami‘ (‘The Earth for all’), advocating for the freedom of movement, and its partner association Jami‘at-al-‘ailāt al-mafqudīn (‘Association of the families of the missing persons’), which organized sit-ins and joined international marches and protests denouncing the effects of EU externalization policies and violent border regimes. In the discourse of these actors, the nexus between revolutionary ideals, the claim for dignity, and freedom of movement is constantly re-enacted in militantly defending both Tunisians and other African migrants’ choice to pursue a future in Europe or elsewhere.⁷⁹

These informal networks actively include asylum seekers, refugees, and irregular migrants, and support them in voicing abuses, reporting cases of push-backs and pre-charge detention to national and international courts for advocacy purposes.⁸⁰ They often alert the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH) offices in Tunis, Medenine, and Sfax,⁸¹ that provide legal guardianship and visit detainees to verify their conditions. Experiences as such show that a multiplicity of actors escaped the disciplining of solidarity underpinned by the humanitarian regime, and attest to how humanitarian borderscapes, other than being the places where care and policing elide, also constitute the potential sites for the emergence of new forms of political life.⁸²

Some interview partners among asylum seekers explained that they deliberately chose to entrust their stories to as many visitors and local and international activists as possible to challenge the isolation they are subjected to while being hosted in reception centers, even if they are aware of the serious risks that can come with such an effort. Only after my colleague and I agreed to meet him and his friend in a café almost deserted, located far from the center they were both housed in, did a refugee interviewee feel safe enough to explain:

When visitors come from the outside, they [the management] […] put [them] in contact with those of us who can barely speak a few words in a foreign language. […] Therefore, we [the persons housed in the center] decided that those who know foreign languages should talk with as many journalists and visitors as possible. However, once I accepted an interview with a lady who told us she was a French journalist investigating UNHCR management of the center. I told her everything I am telling you about […] the abuses we had to endure here and at the border. After a while, however, we discovered she was instead a UNHCR employee from the Tunis office. Now they are watching me at the center as a troublemaker. […] With some brothers and sisters, we also organized a street protest for World Refugee Day. […] We blocked the traffic and claimed our rights, as our demand is to be relocated to Europe. UNHCR reacted alerting the police. Some of us were arrested, taken to the police office, and beaten thanks to UNHCR. It makes you wonder … are we in Libya or Tunisia?⁸³

Other interview partners talked of very diverse mobilization strategies, including resorting to violent fights in reception centres to attract local public opinion’s attention, and make citizens aware that humanitarian response that fails to provide minimum standards of reception ultimately endangers people lives:

Creating disorders in reception centers is the only way for us to obtain food, medications, even a bed to sleep in! You know, these things are supposed to be your right as an asylum seeker! […] Only after the violent fights that happened in the [Medenine] center, [the management] decided to close it. […] Some citizens attacked the reception center by throwing stones at the building. They were enraged with them [the management], not just us. […] Sure, a few of us got severely injured during fights, but thanks to these fights now I get a bed!⁸⁴

Concrete examples were also provided of how technologies are used to networking via social media but also to ‘subvert authority and survive the transit through dangerous and unwelcoming places’:⁸⁵

When we staged minor protests inside the UNHCR center […] we were told that if we did not like it here, we could go back to Libya or cross the sea. Can you imagine? Some of us started secretly filming and recording them [the shelter managers] when they answered us like that. We have materials that can be made public if needed.⁸⁶

These testimonies, albeit predominantly sourced from Northeast African refugees and asylum seekers, vividly unveil the complex underpinnings of navigating southeastern Tunisia’s humanitarian borderscape for mobile persons more generally.

Rather than accepting the assigned role of helpless victims dictated by the ‘humanitarian reason’, the interviewees describe how they strive to redefine their ‘refugeeness’, including working to make sure that their voices are also heard. They do not simply endure displacement and the violence that comes with it; but mobilize among themselves and actively seek allies among local and international citizens and activists to denounce abuses and champion their rights. However, these mobilizations also bare contradictions, for it becomes apparent that – even when they negotiate ‘refugeeness’ as a form of political subjectivity rather than a consignment to perpetual subalternization – my interview partners’ discourse is still entangled with the humanitarian narrative and the categories associated to it.

Striving to bring the changing contingency of their becoming refugees to the fore of the discourse on why they need protection, and why this protection cannot be provided to them in Tunisia, they challenge the rhetoric that depicts them as passive subjects of humanitarian aid. And yet, when they denounce how they are not provided with services they should be entitled to as ‘asylum seekers’, when they decide to stage public protests on World Refugee Day, or when they claim the freedom to move as resulting from having been recognized as refugees – namely by asking for relocation to Europe or the Global North – they discursively mobilize and reinstate the same normative understanding of ‘refugeeness’ on which their exclusionary inclusion is predicated in the first place.

Conclusions

The emergence and subsequent structuring of a humanitarian borderscape in post-2011 southeastern Tunisia demonstrate how specific forms of protection are administered to those recognized as either asylum seekers or refugees, which are incompatible with the autonomy and freedom of the individuals they are deemed to protect. Accordingly, some people on the move become objects of European management of mobility through aid. In the meantime, the result of their victimization intertwined with the flattening of their legal status on collective and essentializing criteria such as nationality or ethnicity, contribute to turning ‘refugeeness’ into a somewhat racial formation anywhere the asylum regime is enforced,⁸⁷ and well beyond European spaces.

To claim objectivity and impartiality, humanitarianism obliterates refugees’ stories and their political positionality. Nevertheless, the asylum regime is constantly resisted and negotiated by asylum seekers and refugees’ individual and collective struggles. This entails them voicing dissent, denouncing abuses, and advocating for their rights in Tunisia, including by developing meaningful relationships with local and international activists and research networks.

Searching for witnesses able to convey how mobile persons’ lives are slowed down and endangered by their very journey throughout international asylum and border regimes, refugees try to make the public opinion aware that vulnerability is (re)produced through time, namely because of the irregularization of some mobility paths to the profit of some others. Accordingly, they set a living example of how refugeeness should be re-historicized and de-essentialized as an issue of becoming rather than being.

Acknowledgements

I want to express sincere gratitude to the blind reviewers and editors whose insightful feedback, expertise, and dedication significantly contributed to the enhancement and refinement of the article. I also extend sincere appreciation to the colleagues of the research project “Infrastructure Space and the Future of Migration Management: The EU Hotspots in the Mediterranean Borderscape”. The project, led by Dr. Prof. Bilgin Ayata at the Seminar of Sociology, University of Basel, in collaboration with Dr. Prof. Kenny Cupers, head of the Urban Studies Department, was generously funded by the Swiss Network of International Studies and involved PhD candidates Artemis Maria Fyssa and Alaa Dia. The supportive and collaborative environment in this research group significantly contributed to the success of both the data collection and analysis phases, forming the foundation upon which this research article is built. Nevertheless, the views expressed in this article are the author’s own, as well as responsibility for any potential mistake. The authors acknowledge the financial support by the University of Graz.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss Network for International Studies under [grant number: C18079].

Notes

1 See Bakewell and Landau, Forging African Communities; Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover; Malkki, “Citizens of Humanity”; “Refugees and Exile”; “Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization” and Wanjiku Kiato and Landau, “Stealth Humanitarianism”.

2 See Agier, “Humanity as an Identity”; Managing the Undesirables; Fassin, “Compassion and Repression”; Humanitarian Reason; Feldman and Ticktin, In the Name of Humanity; Walters, “Foucault and Frontiers”; Weizman, The Least of All Possible; Rajaram, “Humanitarianism and Representations” and Ticktin, “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian”.

3 See Gaibazzi, Bellagamba, and Dünnwald, EurAfrican Borders and Gaibazzi, “Frontiers of Externalisation”.

4 See Fassin, Humanitarian Reason.

5 See Pallister-Wilkins, “Humanitarian Borderwork”; “Hotspots and the Geographies” and Aas and Gundhus, “Policing Humanitarian Borderlands”.

6 Pallister-Wilkins, “Humanitarian Borderwork”, 84.

7 Gaibazzi, “Frontiers of Externalisation”, 226.

8 Cfr Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee; Lemberg-Pedersen, “Manufacturing Displacement” and Williams, “African Refugee History”.

9 Falola and Yacob-Haliso, African Refugees, xxv–xxvi.

10 Garelli and Tazzioli, Tunisia as a Revolutionized, 10.

11 See Dini and Giusa, Externalising Migration Governance.

12 Falola and Yacob-Haliso, African Refugees, 13.

13 See Ciabarri and Simonsen, “Fragments of Solidarity”, in this special issue.

14 See Ayata et al., The Implementation of.

15 UNHCR, Tunisia Factsheet January 2020, https://reporting.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/UNHCR%20Tunisia%20Fact%20Sheet%20-%20January%202020.pdf.

16 See Bakewell and Landau, Forging African Communities.

17 Tazzioli, “People not of our Concern”, 2.

18 See Boubakri and Potot, “De l’élan citoyen”.

19 See Dini and Giusa, Externalising Migration Governance.

20 Cfr. Boubakri, “Revolution and International Migration” and Garelli, Sossi and Tazzioli, Spaces in Migration.

21 See Boubakri and Potot. “Migrations et révolution”.

22 See Giusa, “On a fait la révolution”.

23 See Boubakri and Potot, “De l’élan citoyen”.

24 EuroMed Rights, Asylum and migration in the Maghreb, Country Fact Sheet: Tunisia, (2012), 50–51, https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/514d78422.pdf.

25 CeTuMa (Centre de Tunis pour la Migration et l’Asile), Rapport sur le camp de réfugiés et des demandeurs d’asile de Choucha, (2013).

26 Ibid.

27 EuroMed Rights, Asylum and migration in the Maghreb … , 21.

28 See El Qadim, “Loutte contre l’immigration” and Lamloum, “L’enjeu de l’islamisme”.

29 European Union Civil Protection, Peer-review Report – Tunisia 2018, 15.

30 See Allal, “Penser global, agir”.

31 Dini and Giusa, Externalising Migration Governance, 23–34.

32 Planes-Boissac, V. Asylum and Migration in the Maghreb – Country Fact Sheet: Tunisia, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network, (2012), 19.

33 See UNHCR, Report on the Consultations Between UNHCR and Humanitarian and Human Rights NGOs in North Africa and the Middle East on Strengthening Collaboration in Support of the International Refugee Protection System, (8–9 November 2000) and UNHCR NGO Unit, Report on PARinAC and Plan of Action 2000, Geneva.

34 PARinAC – Partnership in Action, Oslo Declaration and Plan of Action, (9 June 1994).

35 See Boubakri, “Migration et asile”.

36 Cfr. Dini and Giusa, Externalising Migration Governance, 35.

37 See Cassarini, “L’immigration subsaharienne”.

38 Dini and Giusa, Externalising Migration Governance, 4.

39 See Abbott et al., International Organizations as Orchestrators.

40 See Cuttitta, “Non-Governmental/Civil Society”.

41 See Dakhlia, “Can We Think in Transition?”.

42 Andersson, Illegality, Inc.

43 Reid-Henry, “Humanitarianism as Liberal Diagnostic”.

44 Author’s interview with the Director of the Arab Institute for Human Rights, Tunis, Spring 2019.

45 Garelli and Tazzioli, Tunisia as a Revolutionized, viii.

46 See Zetter, “Refugees and Refugee Studies”.

47 Tazzioli, “People not of our Concern”.

48 EuroMed Rights, Tunisia: evacuation of the Choucha camp, (22 June 2017).

49 Bisiaux, Politiques du non-accueil, 13.

50 Naceur, S. P. Tunisia. Migration control.info (2020), 9.

51 Forum Tunisien pour les Droits Économiques et Sociaux (FTDES), La situation des migrants dans le centre du Croissant Rouge à Médenine, (January 2019).

52 See how the concept is used by Binaisa, “We are all Ugandans”, 222.

53 Author’s interview with the responsible of Medenine field office of the Arab Institute for Human Rights, Medenine, Summer 2019.

54 Author’s interview with the head of the Tunisian Red Crescent’s Medenine branch, Medenine, Summer 2019.

55 Author’s conversations with irregularized migrants from Darfur, South-Sudan, and Somalia hosted in the former IOM reception centre for male adults of the “Route de Djerba”, Medenine, July and August 2019.

56 Pallister-Wilkins, “Hotspots and the Geographies”, 991.

57 Author’s interview with the responsible of Medenine field office of the Arab Institute for Human Rights, Medenine, Summer 2019.

58 See Malkki, “Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization”.

59 See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

60 Bakewell and Hein de Haas, “African Migrations: Continuities”, 112.

61 Hamood, African Transit Migration.

62 Cfr. Akrimi, “Racisme, blanchité et État-nation”; El Miri, “Devenir « noir »”; Mrad Dali, “Migrations et construction”; Oualdi, “Commemorating the Abolition” and Scaglioni, Becoming the ‘Abid’.

63 See note 53 above.

64 L. Carretero, “Le centre pour migrants de Médenine va fermer ses portes”, Infomigrants, 25 March 2019, https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/15909/le-centre-pour-migrants-de-medenine-va-fermer-ses-portes.

65 Author’s interview with the responsible of Medenine field office of the Arab Institute for Human Rights, Medenine, Summer 2019; Author’s interview with the head of the Tunisian Red Crescent’s Medenine branch, Medenine, Summer 2019.

66 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with Jarjis Mayor, Jarjis, Summer 2019; Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea, Jarjis, Summer 2019; Author Alaa Dia’s interview with 23-year-old refugee from Eritrea, Medenine, Summer 2019.

67 Author’s conversations with irregularized migrants from Darfur, South-Sudan, and Somalia hosted in the former IOM reception centre for male adults of the “Route de Djerba”, Medenine, July and August 2019.

68 Author’s interview with the responsible of Medenine field office of the Arab Institute for Human Rights, Medenine, Summer 2019.

69 See Agamben, The Omnibus Homo.

70 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea, Jarjis, Summer 2019.

71 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with 23-year-old refugee from Eritrea, Medenine, Summer 2019.

72 Author’s interview with the responsible of Medenine field office of the Arab Institute for Human Rights, Medenine, Summer 2019.

73 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with Jarjis Mayor, Jarjis, Summer 2019.

74 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea, Jarjis, Summer 2019.

75 Forum Tunisien pour les Droits Économiques et Sociaux (FTDES), La situation des migrants.

76 Bisiaux, Politiques du non-accueil.

77 ASGI Shabaka&Oruka project presentation, https://sciabacaoruka.asgi.it/en/project/.

78 Zagaria, “A Small Story With”, 540.

79 Author’s interview with the funder of the al-Ard li-l-jami‘ association and member of the Jami‘at-al-‘ailāt al-mafqudīn, Tunis, Summer 2019.

80 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with a French independent journalist and activist for freedom of movement and migrant’s right, Tunis, Summer 2019.

81 A formal agreement with the Ministry of Interior allows LTDH to obtain updated information on the whereabouts of all detention centers for irregular migrants operated throughout the national territory, and to access them to assist detainees. Author’s interview with the director of LTDH central office in Tunisia, Tunis, Summer 2019.

82 See Agamben, The Omnibus Homo, 14.

83 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with a 23-year-old refugee from Eritrea, Summer 2019.

84 Author and Alaa Dia’s interview with a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea, Summer 2019.

85 Jones et al., “Interventions on the State”, 1.

86 Ibid.

87 See De Genova, “The ‘Migrant Crisis’ as Racial”.