Event by: in collaboration with muqawama (https://www.instagram.com/muqawama.de)
and tadamun (https://www.instagram.com/tadamun.fr)
This talk examines the events in Ceuta not as a self-evident “migration crisis,” but as an entry point into understanding how borders are narrated, enforced and reproduced. It begins with the mass crossing of the Morocco–Spain border and the subsequent military and police response, including the denial of food, water, shelter and medical care, as well as large-scale returns carried out under conditions described as “voluntary.”
The talk then traces how the events were interpreted by Spanish, European Union and German officials, the far right, Palestine solidarity activists, geopolitical commentators, decolonial currents and antiracist movements. These competing explanations blame smugglers, defend Europe’s external borders, present migration as geopolitical pressure, invoke alleged Israeli coordination or challenge Spain’s colonial possession of Ceuta. Rather than treating these discourses as neutral descriptions, the talk asks how they naturalise or contest the border, whose agency they recognise and which people they render invisible.
The analysis then moves from event and discourse to structure. It understands the border not merely as a geographical line, but as a social relation connecting migrants, states, police, employers, citizenship regimes and institutions of asylum and deportation. Through these relations, people are racialised as migrants, made deportable and subjected to differentiated distributions of rights, privilege and vulnerability.
The talk concludes that political analysis must centre migrants as subjects rather than reduce them to threats, victims or instruments of geopolitical conflict. An antiracist and anti-imperialist response must defend the right to migrate, full rights for all migrants, the abolition of exclusionary immigration laws and the end of colonial rule in Ceuta and Melilla.
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About tadamun: tadamun means solidarity, it is a grassroots, democratically organised collective still taking shape, an experiment and a platform for everyone working towards justice. Its work is based on antiracist, anticolonial and antizionist organisation.
About muqawama: muqawama is a new project aiming to bridge the gap between knowledge and action.