Paper short abstract:

How can a cross-border political community be created against a repressive migration regime, a community which transgresses conventional citizenship? What is the meaning of a political solidarity with the protests of the illegalized people instead of a moral solidarity?

Paper long abstract:

Since 2019, hundreds of people from Tunisia have been trapped in a migrant centre in Melilla. During the pandemic, beginning in March 2020, when Spain closed its borders, the people inside have been subject to a deportation procedure. In response, they have organized hunger strikes and protests demanding their way out to Spain. Dozens have been arrested after the last protest in August. At the same time, demonstrations have been organized in Tunisia in front of the Spanish Embassy calling for freedom and the migrants’ release. While protests were being organized in Melilla and in Tunisia, the Spanish authorities have been negotiating with Tunisia an agreement for the forced return of the people.

During these months, protesters documented impunity and abuses in the centre of Melilla almost on a daily basis. Centred on remote ethnographic notes during quarantine and interviews with people inside the centre in Melilla, activists in Tunisia and politicians in Spain, the question raised is how can a political community be formed without the framework of the conventional citizenship. How a new political subjectivity can resist a “migration apparatus” (Feldman, 2011) with totalitarian traits? Opposed to a moral solidarity, what is the meaning of a political solidarity as a form of resistance, a political solidarity which requires a new political subjectivity that transgresses the symbolic imagery of the nation-state?