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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the post-pandemic hardening of the Ceuta–Morocco border through everyday economic practices. It shows how border closure reshaped circulation and survival in northern Morocco, making sovereignty visible as a lived and contested process.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the post-pandemic hardening of the Ceuta–Morocco border from the Moroccan side, focusing on how border closure reshaped everyday economic practices and survival strategies in northern Morocco. For decades, daily crossings sustained dense circuits of trade and mobility that structured livelihoods in border towns. The sudden interruption of this circulation disrupted income, coordination, and locally established ways of managing authority and constraint.

Based on ethnographic observation, interviews with traders and residents, and analysis of policy documents as social artefacts, the paper traces how border hardening reorganised everyday practices in Tetouan and Fnideq. Rather than relying on a formal versus informal distinction, the analysis foregrounds how economic life is practically organised under conditions of restricted mobility. These practices appear as adaptive systems that combine coordination, negotiation, and improvisation.

As control was recentralised through surveillance, regulated crossings, and security infrastructures, access to movement and opportunity became increasingly uneven. Border governance produced new frictions and dependencies, intensifying social differentiation within local communities. In response, actors recalibrated routes, networks, and strategies to maintain circulation under altered conditions.

By focusing on the Moroccan side of the Ceuta border, the paper shows how sovereignty becomes tangible through everyday restrictions on movement rather than abstract claims of authority. The analysis contributes to anthropological debates on borders and popular economic life by grounding economic practices in everyday encounters with border governance.