The Territory of Transit. Migrants’ Spatial Strategies of Cross-Border Mobility in the Spain-Morocco Borderzone

Abstract

This paper explores how “irregular migrants,” by negotiating and eluding borders, challenge our common understanding of territoriality and trigger socio-political transformation. I draw on a fieldwork in the Spain-Morocco borderzone to analyze the interaction between the creative tactics of migrants on the move and the governmental tools put in place by EU to filter the flow of people towards its territory. I discuss how border externalization affects the territorial arrangement of the area and how migrants confront and actively transform it. Bordered space becomes a site of struggle, resistance and contestation by subjects who trouble such order through their movement.