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Paper short abstract

AI in Morocco's border surveillance reveals harms: lethal drone violence causing deportations, disinformation vilifying migrants. Reinforces colonial legacies, epistemic injustices marginalizing values, racialized oppression. Highlights decolonial resistance via open-source tools.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in Morocco's border control and surveillance systems, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in border regions and urban centers like Rabat and Tangier. Building on the panel's focus on epistemological, material, and historical power configurations shaping AI, the analysis reveals how AI perpetuates corporeal and immaterial harms, targeting migrants, political dissenters, and marginalized communities. Morocco's integration of AI in automated border surveillance—such as facial recognition and predictive analytics for migrant interception—mirrors global extractive data practices exploiting labor and environmental resources in the global South, while reinforcing colonial legacies from French and Spanish influences. Through in-depth interviews with migrants, activists, and border officials, the paper illustrates how AI-enabled systems facilitate lethal violence, including automated drone surveillance leading to deportations and drownings in the Strait of Gibraltar, and amplify disinformation campaigns vilifying sub-Saharan migrants as threats. These technologies perpetuate gendered and racialized oppression, akin to abusive AI companionship models, and entrench epistemic injustices by prioritizing instrumental rationality over pluriversal values rooted in Amazigh and Arab-Islamic epistemologies. Yet, the paper highlights decolonial and feminist struggles resisting AI oppression, such as grassroots Moroccan initiatives using open-source tools to subvert surveillance data and advocate for data sovereignty. Situating Morocco within broader AI warfare infrastructures, this ethnographic inquiry contributes to rewriting AI through radical futurities, emphasizing how local adoption enables violence while offering anti-capitalist reclamation pathways. It underscores anthropological perspectives to dismantle AI's role in perpetuating historical injustices in North African contexts.