Reframing coercive engineered migration theory: Ceuta and the Western Sahara

ABSTRACT

By opening the gates on the border to Ceuta in May 2021, Morocco explicitly engaged in coercive engineered migration (CEM) to establish a tradeoff of sovereignty claims over the Spanish exclave city and the Western Sahara territory. In this article, we test Greenhill’s theory on why stronger liberal democratic states yield to this strategy by weaker autocratic states against the public debate in Spain on how the government devolved the migrants and relinquished the future of its ex-colony in the desert, with evidence from the mass media, official documents and personal interviews. We offer an alternative conceptual model for CEM by critically recalibrating factors within her domestic account and shifting the focus to geopolitical considerations. We argue that externalization of border control has tended to blur expected differences among political regimes, reducing the risk of ideological polarization and hypocrisy costs, typical of democracies according to theory, and leaving fear of swamping of hosting resources as the main domestic explanation of successful CEM across regimes. It has embedded border control in multiple issue-linkages, increasing the leverage of countries of origin and transit in the multi-scalar international tapestry of migration diplomacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Coercive engineered migration
• migration diplomacy
• Spain
• Morocco
• Ceuta

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to interviewees in Ceuta and Madrid; to Cecilia Eseverri-Mayer and Ghufran Khir Allah who shared the fieldwork; to Claudia Finotelli, Nicolás Soler, Luise Stoisser and Cecilia Cavero, who commented on previous versions of the paper; to Marco Martiniello and other researchers of the CEDEM (Liège) who shared their impressions on the preliminary version of the paper; and to anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This figure represents almost a fifth of the 83.517 inhabitants of Ceuta (National Institute for Statistics at https://www.ine.es/jaxi/Datos.htm?path=/t20/e245/p08/l0/&file=02002.px.)

2. The French National Research Agency (ANR) and the funding agency Norface validated the data management plan that describes the ethical commitments followed in this research.

3. The impact of externalization trickles down to everyday relations of intimacy: European racial prejudice combines with migration related definitions of otherness to reinforce perceptions of out-of-placeness among black and dark-skinned groups, both indigenous and migrant (Gross-Wyrtzen & El Yacoubi, 2022).

4. Ideological polarization occurs over policy options, not social cleavages or party affection (Iyengar et al., 2019; Lelkels, 2016; Mason, 2015).

5. See questions 22 and 23 of the poll Barómetro de Junio 2021, at www.cis.es.

6. Moroccan and Spanish authorities negotiated a plan to normalize customs in Ceuta, which would allegedly put an end to the porteadoras’ business, as part of the ‘new relationship’ announced in 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NORFACE under grant number 462-19-110.