Seven Questions for Hassan Ould Moctar on the Politics of Migration in Mauritania

"Cooperation with European migration control prerogatives is basically etched into the political settlement that has become consolidated in Mauritania since 2008."

Dr. Hassan Ould Moctar of the School of Oriental and African Studies is a keen observer of dynamics surrounding migration and “migration control,” particularly in West Africa. He is the author of an incisive book, After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania, which is available open access here. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from his scholarship. After Mauritania ramped up deportations earlier this year, I posed a few questions to him about the dynamics driving and surrounding these expulsions.

AT: Mauritania stepped up its expulsions of irregular migrants in February 2025. What are the proximate triggers of this latest wave of deportations?

HM: It is difficult to say why the government chose this exact moment to ramp up its detention and expulsion campaign to such an unprecedented scale, but it was preceded by an equally unprecedented degree of pressure from European Union (EU) partners to crack down on unauthorised arrivals on the Canary Islands, which themselves also reached unprecedented levels in 2024. In February 2025, just before the launch of the expulsion campaign, the President of the Canary Islands travelled to Mauritania to discuss how to clamp down on sea arrivals with government officials. This was preceded by a visit to Mauritania by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for similar purposes in August 2024, in which a circular migration scheme between the two countries was promised, an initiative I would read as rewarding the Mauritanian state with a limited degree of legal mobility for its citizens in exchange for cracking down on non-citizens within its territory. And most prominently, the European Commission and the Mauritanian government signed a migration partnership agreement in March 2024, which promised Mauritania €210 million for migration management purposes over the course of the year. This agreement followed requests by Mauritanian authorities for greater recognition of its role within EU external migration policy, of the kind afforded to Tunisia, which had also signed a migration deal in July 2023. And in that context too, mass expulsions and xenophobic rhetoric spiked in tandem with the enhancement of cooperation with EU migration cooperation. So while not the sole proximate trigger, EU migration policy – and in particular the strategy of ‘border externalization’ – appears to be a prominent one.

AT: What is "border externalization" and how would you characterize the relationship between the European Union and Mauritania?

HM: ‘Border externalization’ refers to any measure that is taken to prevent ‘irregular migration’ at its perceived point of origin and/or transit, as opposed to at the point of arrival. It therefore in practice often involves rich countries outsourcing irregular migration prevention responsibilities beyond their borders. This can take a militarised form, like the deployment of Spanish police and Guardia Civil officials to Mauritania and other West African states. But it can also take the ‘softer’ form of development assistance or circular migration schemes, such as the one mentioned above. While there is a clear power asymmetry at play between the states ‘externalizing’ and the ones at the receiving end of this strategy, many scholars working on the topic point out that the latter nonetheless leverage the fear of migration in Europe and other rich countries for their own benefit. This is certainly true, but it’s worth bearing in mind that any benefits that accrue from wielding this ‘weapon of the weak’ are confined to ruling elites in such contexts, rather than the population more widely, who if anything are victims of this strategy.

All these elements are at play in the relationship between the EU and Mauritania, which has long been a Western partner not only in the area of migration control but also a range of other domains of ‘cooperation’ – economic, security, diplomacy, etc. But as you have rightly pointed out, under Ghazouani and even Aziz this has been less a blind, unthinking loyalty to Western priorities, and more a strategic and selective adoption of those priorities which are most amenable to domestic interests. This has become even more pronounced in recent years; as other states in the region reject Western influence, Mauritania has seen its bargaining power vis a vis the EU increase, which may have had a role to play in the migration partnership deal that was signed last year. But, in keeping with the above, I would still view this as bargaining from a position of relative economic dependency and peripherality, which certainly benefits a segment of the elite but largely keeps the majority of the population immiserated.

AT: You wrote about the EU-Mauritania migration deal in March 2024 for Al Jazeera - how do you assess the domestic impacts of the deal a year later?

HM: In the immediate aftermath of the deal’s signing, I was struck by the degree of domestic opposition it came up against. This was very different from how things stood in 2017-2018, when I conducted the PhD fieldwork on which my book is based. At that time, EU external migration policy in Mauritania seemed to most ordinary people I spoke with to be a dry, technical affair which didn’t concern them. After the signing of the migration deal last year, on the other hand, EU migration policy was the subject of much heated public debate, with a discourse emerging that Mauritania was being used by the EU as a dumping ground to resettle people unwanted in Europe. Protests against it were organised on these grounds in the run up to and in the immediate aftermath of the deal’s signing. This opposition seemed to taper off in subsequent months, and it didn’t to my knowledge figure in the July presidential election campaign that saw Ghazouani re-elected. But a desire within government circles to refute the perception that the EU was using Mauritania as a dumping ground could have formed part of the decision to begin expelling people en masse from state territory earlier this year. In any event, the government announcement that upward of 80 smuggling networks had been dismantled and over 30,000 migrants intercepted so far this year is certainly consistent with the fourth ‘priority area’ of the joint declaration that formalised the migration deal, which concerned tackling people smuggling and human trafficking. Indeed, the government has reportedly [HO1] justified its expulsion campaign in terms of policing human trafficking, suggesting – at the very least – that the deal has provided a justificatory rhetorical framework for the expulsions campaign.

AT: How do you assess the presidency of Mohamed Ould Ghazouani overall? When it comes to migration policy, do you see major differences between him and his predecessor Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, or do you mostly see continuity and expansion of the same basic policy framework?

HM: In terms of migration policy, Ghazouani has largely adhered to the same framework that Abdel Aziz oversaw with Spanish and EU counterparts. It’s worth noting that the era of externalization commenced in 2006 in Mauritania, so between the 2005 military coup that brought an end to the twenty-one-year reign of Mou’aouiya Ould Sid-Ahmed al-Taya’ and the 2008 coup that brought Abdel Aziz to power, in which Ghazouani also participated. In other words, cooperation with European migration control prerogatives is basically etched into the political settlement that has become consolidated in Mauritania since 2008, of which both Abdel Aziz and Ghazouani are expressions. Moreover, there isn’t much domestic cost to abiding by EU migration policy priorities, since – unlike in, say, Senegal – it largely involves restricting the mobility of non-nationals rather than citizens. More generally, there seems to me to be a substantial degree of continuity between Abdel Aziz and Ghazouani in terms of domestic approaches to the opposition, external security and many other issues. This, despite the increasingly spectacular fallout between the two – most recently embodied in Abdel Aziz’s prison term being tripled on appeal.

AT: Your book has traced the deeper history of Mauritania's management of people and borders - could you walk us through the book's key arguments, particularly regarding the "violent colonial legacy of racialized territorial belonging, the waste of global capitalism, and a border regime that sustains and consolidates the relationship between the two" (p. 178)?

HM: The book starts from a premise that is widely observed within migration studies and which I think is borne out in how things have unfolded in Mauritania since the migration deal was signed last year. This premise is that externalization policies (and restrictive migration regimes in general) paradoxically tend to produce more irregular migration, and thus more ‘migrant illegality’, as a lived experience and social condition. On the basis of this premise, the book asks how this process of producing migrant illegality – or what the anthropologist Nicholas De Genova once called ‘deportability’ – interacts with pregiven social relations in contexts like Mauritania.

This question of pre-existing social relations is where the colonial legacy of racialized territorial belonging and the ‘waste’ of global capitalism come in. The former emerges from the fact that Mauritanian national belonging has since its inception been fractured by a racialized division between ‘Arab Moors’ and ‘Black Africans’. This racial distinction of course predates the French colonial period in the region, but it was at this point that it was territorialized. The consequences – in terms of who is deemed to belong within state borders and who is deemed ‘deportable’ – have been periodically felt by Afro-Mauritanians throughout the history of Mauritanian independence: during a campaign of mass expulsions on the Senegal River Valley in the late 1980’s; during a biometric overhaul of the civil registry in 2012; and of course throughout the period of border externalization in the country, not least the most recent round of expulsions.

The other element of the social relations in which illegality and deportability take root in Mauritania is the ‘waste’ of global capitalism in many such Global South contexts, where the informal economy is the primary employment sector for migrant workers. Given that the bureaucratic conditions to regularize one’s status are essentially out of reach for anyone working in the informal economy, there is a sense in which this informal economy, and the contemporary capitalist system which produces it, are themselves also productive of migrant illegality. It is for these reasons that the above passage suggests the border regime to sustain and consolidate a relationship between the colonial legacy of racialized territorial belonging and the dynamics of global capitalism.

AT: The book includes vivid descriptions of the border crossing at Rosso. You write that "the formal procedures enacted there at the behest of international migration management protocol" lead to "informal practices of bribery and extortion" (pp. 120-121). Can you explain this relationship to readers who haven't yet looked at your book?

This is slightly related to the above point about what happens when migration management procedures and their social consequences become embedded in contexts of structural peripherality and informality. The EU in 2014 funded a reconstruction of the police buildings at the Rosso border separating Senegal and Mauritania. The design was consistent with international standards – a spatial separation between entry and exit, a narrow pathway leading to the building to ensure a single-file queue into the space where entrance and exit stamps are delivered, etc. But the wider setting remained one in which border officials are poorly paid, the majority of crossings are by people travelling to Rosso to sell items on the street or to work in domestic care, and there is a vast surplus of labour in the environs of the town. These features together give rise to an extractive informal economy at the border, in which a vast network of informal intermediaries facilitate the expedition and circumventing of procedures and regulations. For these reasons, the bureaucratic procedures that are instilled by international migration and border management protocol– through training and capacity building programmes that the EU and other international actors run in Mauritania – in practice become sites of informal revenue generation for border officials and informal intermediaries.

AT: In one striking part of the book, you draw on the Andalusian Sufi Muhyi al-Din Ibn 'Arabi to analyze how migrants make sense of their experiences in religious terms. You write, "Within the vernacular means by which those on the urban margins make sense of their reality, then, there is a latent universalism, one in which the tension between individual agency and structures of control is lucidly articulated, and ultimately dissolved in the Oneness of Being" (p. 166). You return to the idea of universalism in the final pages of the conclusion (especially pp. 177-178). Who is included in this "latent universalism," and what conditions might transform it from latent to active?

HM: I should probably first say this is the most speculative part of the book, and it is where the line between empirical and normative or political argument collapses substantially. But it did emerge from the empirical material, and in particular the ubiquitous presence of the divine within the meaning making strategies of those on the urban margins in Mauritania, with whom I was conducting ethnographic research. This divine presence seemed to be the main way that people made sense of their agency. Given that migrant agency is the focal point of the book’s ethnographic chapters, it would have seemed somewhat perverse to me to just erase this observation from the writing process.

So I instead tried to have it intervene within a conceptual dialogue introduced earlier in the book between Ibn ‘Arabi and Samir Amin. Vast differences between these two thinkers notwithstanding, both share a concern with universalism. Ibn Arabi’s universalist philosophy is anchored in his philosophy of the Oneness of Being. Amin is more concerned with the Eurocentric universalist ideology of global capitalism, which proclaimed a universal humanity while simultaneously denying it in practice. He does call for a more encompassing, non-Eurocentric universalism, but does not elaborate upon it. This is unsurprising when you think about how hegemonic Eurocentric universalism was at the time of his writing in the late 1980’s, to the extent that Francis Fukuyama was able to proclaim Western liberal democracy and capitalism had brought an end to history itself.

This is in stark contrast to the present day, which is characterized by a growing rift between the world system and the Eurocentric universalist narrative of Western superiority which, as Amin shows, has historically accompanied it. The book views externalization to be an expression of this rift, which is evidenced in the Mediterranean’s contemporary status as a mass grave, the collapse of Western intervention structures in the Sahel, and more recently the genocide in Gaza. In their own way, these and many other contemporary examples lay bare the narrow, parochial conception of humanity that has long underpinned Western liberal democracy and its colonial underbelly.

It is these shifting global conditions, dangerous and terrifying as they are, which may eventually create space for a more encompassing universalism, one which would – ideally and by definition – include all of humanity. The book attempts this in the Mauritanian context by linking Ibn ‘Arabi’s universalist concept of the Oneness of Being to the presence of the divine within the perspective of its interlocutors. But more broadly, its implicit hope is that if there is a shared humanity to be found in the ashes of Western Eurocentrism, it ought to be grounded in the perspective of those today dehumanised under this fading order as ‘illegal’, surplus, and racially inferior.