From Human Smuggling to State Capture: Furthering Neoliberal Governance in North Africa
Domain:
peace and securityCreator:
Mat
Publisher:
Wal
Host:
Abstract
When examining the issue of human smuggling and its facilitating practises, mainstream ir analyses emphasize its criminal and illegal aspects. Such securocratic interpretations, largely mirroring EU concerns over migration, have managed to crowd-out alternative explanations of this phenomenon, detaching it from issues of capital and class. Drawing on fieldwork and secondary sources, this paper argues that people’s involvement in the facilitation of human smuggling in Tunisia has emerged because of the increasing precariousness of labor and life. Precarity, however, is not the result of weak and failing institutions; rather it should be understood in relation to the subordinate integration of Tunisia into the global neoliberal economy. In such a context, the EU’s insistence on policies based on border security and free-trade agreements securitises the lives of the poor to serve wealthy regional and European elites, thus furthering neoliberal governance in North Africa.
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