Paper short abstract:

By way of historical and ethnographic work, we show the colonial roots of the border regime and its humanitarian dispositifs. Melilla, sadly famous for its fence at the European border, illustrates the coloniality of neoliberal forms of government and the gender arrangements that configure them.

Paper long abstract:

In Melilla humanitarian dispositifs contribute to the border regime as much as securitarian ones. They are two sides of the same regime of mobility control, which is deeply rooted in the Spanish colonial order in Morocco and which reproduces the patriarchal premises about colonial “others”, particularly women.

By way of long-term historical and ethnographic research in Melilla, we show how both forms of border government—humanitarian and securitarian—share similar and imbricated mandates, and operate in continuity with apparently antagonistic regimes like colonial Francoist pacification. Where before the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco “protected” a colonial subject openly considered inferior, today neoliberal humanitarianism “assists” a racialized subject deemed in some way deficient. In both, woman occupies a place inferior to that of man. Both regimes share the ambition of “improving” the subjugated population, from a perpetual and supremacist eurocentrism. Our decolonizing and feminist approach shows how the subcontracting of government to the humanitarian complex creates a sector that is feminized, precarized, and profoundly dependent on the securitarian government of the border. Its political dependence on and functional integration with the border regime provokes an (only apparent) depoliticization of the humanitarian sector. Its modus operandi, organized through “projects” that solve aid “problems” in the border context, generates perverse effects, both on humanitarian aid professionals and “beneficiaries” or “users”. Moreover, the “projectorate”, as well call it, recreates ethno-racial hierarchies anew.