A Window into the Lives of Immobilised Migrants at the Borders of Europe

Time, Migration and Forced Immobility is the third book in the Global Migration and Social Change series published by Bristol University Press. The aim of the series is to offer a platform for new scholarship that challenges established understandings and explores under-researched topics in migration and refugee studies. Inka Stock's timely and readable ethnographic investigation does exactly this. It casts a novel light on the unfolding lives of a group of migrants stranded in Morocco. Neither settling nor moving on, the book shows how their in-between position gradually leads to them, in Stock's words, losing ‘their name, their status, their home, their past and their future’.

Stock's migrant-centred approach offers a nuanced and original perspective on the interplay of forces and interests which condition movement and stay in a country such as Morocco, a crucial transit node along the western Mediterranean route to Europe. For its position, Morocco plays a strategic role in Spain and the European Union's efforts to curtail onward migration from Sub-Saharan Africa, and over the years the country has been party in numerous EU-sponsored initiatives aimed at controlling the southern Mediterranean border. From the perspective of European policy makers, the partnership with Morocco is considered a model of successful cooperation in migration management. At the peak of the so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis in 2015, when sea arrivals in Greece exceeded 800,000 migrants and over 150,000 individuals disembarked in Italy, Spain received just over 5,000 boat migrants. The western Mediterranean route was de facto sealed, while Europe's border regime was failing to cope with inflows from Libya and Turkey.

However, what policy makers may qualify as a success looks very different from the perspectives of those who are immobilized in Morocco, unable to fulfil their migration goals and suspended in a condition of protracted temporariness with no end in sight.

This book opens a window into the existential reverberations of geopolitical arrangements between Morocco and the EU, offering a compassionate and eloquent illustration of the process by which immobilised migrants become displaced within humanity.