What can a Global South ethnographer say about migratory tensions in the Global North? The crisis in Ceuta (Spain–Morocco)

A couple of months after beginning an exploratory journey across the border between Ceuta and Morocco, I started a series of short articles and creative accounts —a mix of ethnographic description, essay, literature, and multimedia— another way to tell stories outside academic language. Combining participant observation, thick description, photographic portraiture, visual autoethnography, and interviews with migrants and specialists on the subject, I methodologically wove all these elements together to build an understanding from below of the migration crisis in that territory — what I dare to call an attempt at a political ethnography of migration.

Migrating is not easy for anyone, not even for me, who at the time held a position as a visiting scholar at Utrecht University but had no home; caught between political and legal setbacks in my own country and a profound housing crisis in the Netherlands, both scenarios — political and structural — forced me to remain in motion. These circumstances, together with my passion for social research and justice and my curiosity about cultural worlds foreign to my worldview, led me to Morocco —a journey into myself.

I’m interested in global border dynamics, the migratory and humanitarian crises of the Global South, and how international politics shapes human mobility. To grasp that, you have to be there, because traditional media and social networks tell only part of the story —just as traditional academia does. And faced with all this (mis)information, what can ethnography say? What can a sociologist who moves between urban violence studies and migration studies say?

One possible answer is to tie up loose ends and speculate on theoretical approaches, starting from hypotheses raised in the field, to leave clues for future situated or comparative research. I do not dare to answer with strong affirmations or conclusions, but rather to better shape a series of questions that emerged after systematizing what I observed in Ceuta and its border:

Questions

• Why did Morocco’s national and local government take so long to intervene in the crisis?

• How was it possible that national security forces failed to notice the massive flow and the concentration of people heading toward the border?

• How is it possible that military cyberintelligence neither detected nor anticipated a mobilization call of this kind?

• What protection guarantees exist for migrants who were forced to return after their failed attempt to enter Ceuta?

• Was this political tension and the migration crisis between Morocco and Spain planned?

• In the hypothetical case that Morocco did plan this migration crisis, did it act unilaterally, or in line with multinational or supranational criteria?

• Faced with this scenario of political uncertainty and population management, where do ethics and human rights stand?

• What can ethnography tell us about these events?

Through the series of six stories that make up this personal project devoted to the Ceuta crisis, I now propose a list of sociological reflections, meant to open bridges of dialogue with actors and specialists, both academic and non-academic.

Reflections in motion

• The Ceuta migration crisis had a political impact with greater media repercussion in Spain than in Morocco.

• The migration crisis in Ceuta (Spain) triggered a domino effect across European Union media outlets.

• The narrative of the Ceuta migration crisis fueled the anti-migration radicalism of far-right political parties, such as Vox in Spain and others in Germany, Italy, and France.

• The media machinery built an information bubble based on an apocalyptic communication strategy: the endless reproduction of an image of terror. Foreign invasion as an excuse for political radicalization.

• In dominant media and political discourse, the image is racialized as an identity strategy that opposes civilization (the EU) to barbarism (Morocco).

• In Morocco, no one speaks of a migration crisis; the dispute is over the territory of Ceuta.

• The political and media narrative that Morocco puts forward about the migratory tensions in Ceuta tends to be delegitimized or subordinated to the hegemonic narratives of the EU bloc. Colonialism is still in force.

• To understand migrants’ true motivation for mobilizing, look at their phones. In the digital universe, subjectivities, information, and algorithmic strategies circulate in ways that exceed usual sociological or political understandings.

• Mass migration is not due exclusively to national, local, or territorial factors; it is quite likely that supranational elements also complement and trigger it. Beyond the global systemic causes stemming from center-periphery asymmetries, which trace the effects of human mobility back to structural factors, I wonder whether a form of mobility also exists, induced by supra-state corporate actors.

• Tech corporations cannot be ruled out as important actors in carrying out strategies of manipulation, distraction, and transformation of the international political scene.

• Beyond the geopolitical affinities and interests of certain powers in administering strategic overseas territories, religion and its ethics continue to unite, divide, or generate tensions between states.

• Young people’s subjectivity is shaped by promises of the future and by subjectivities arising from the desire for access to the consumer market. Simulation or fiction as drivers of human mobility.

• One can never rule out that even the most vulnerable migrant has social agency — that is, survival strategies capable of instrumentalizing any international legal system that restricts human mobility.

• Moroccan migrants are far more heterogeneous than European public opinion tends to portray.

• Gender perspective receives little attention in local and European analyses of the migration dimension in Ceuta and Morocco.

• Classical academic research is far from grasping migratory dynamics and their complexities from behind a desk. Fieldwork and dialogue with those involved are necessary.

• One might ask whether migration-crisis scenarios like the one in Ceuta don’t end up functioning as triggers: bombarding digital media and the subjectivity of European citizens, feeding paranoia, radicalizing public opinion, and pushing the local/national political scene from participatory democracy toward ethno-racialized polarization. This is a hypothesis, not a conclusion, and I leave it open for future research.

• Beyond the far-right parties and media machinery already noted, one cannot rule out a possible supranational technobureaucratic agenda equally interested in turning the undocumented migrant into Europe’s new public enemy.

¡The End!

List of stories/articles

1. De camino a Ceuta; apuntes para una etnografía política de la migración Sur — Diario etnográfico, primer episodio — 10/10/2026

2. Ceuta, Tensión migratoria y Política continental — Diario etnográfico, segundo episodio — 8/3/2026

3. Cruce de frontera Ceuta-Castillejos — Diario etnográfico, tercer episodio — 8/3/2026

4. Del otro lado de la frontera, geopolítica, migración y poder. La perspectiva de Marruecos — Diario etnográfico, cuarto capítulo — 8/3/2026

5. Más allá de la frontera (Castillejos). Sobre los pasos del migrante... De camino a Tetuán — Diario etnográfico, capítulo quinto — 10/12/2026

6. Tetuán, policía secreta, diálogo con académicos locales... La Medina y su mística — Diario etnográfico, capítulo sexto — 10/12/2026