Hassan Ould Moctar, LSE Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

This year, the EU ramped up its efforts to prevent “irregular migration” from Mauritania to the Canary Islands. At the same time, an ongoing degradation of the security situation in north and central Mali has driven a sharp increase in the number of people seeking refuge in eastern Mauritania. As a result, there is a growing risk of the right to asylum and the protection of refugees being further eroded through the EU’s outsourcing of migration control policies to Mauritania. This paper charts a genealogy of these two policy areas in Mauritania – externalised migration governance and refugee protection – and highlights a growing institutional overlap between the two. In doing so, it suggests a logic of containment to be driving this union.

Introduction

Mauritania has recently become home to two seemingly distinct migration trends, each unprecedented in magnitude. On the one hand, the country has seen a record number of departures to the Canary Islands, having overtaken Senegal as the main point of exit for people attempting the Atlantic Route to Spain. In January alone, the Spanish Ministry of Interior estimated that 83% of the 7,720 people who arrived on the Canary Islands had come from Mauritania.[1] The average number of those who perished en route is also likely to have been as high as 1,000 per month in the first five months of 2024.[2] At the same time, an equally unprecedented number of people have arrived in Mauritania from northern and central Mali, seeking refuge from a rapidly deteriorating security situation. The UNHCR estimates the number of refugees in Mauritania to today be over 200,000, 100,000 of whom are accommodated in a refugee camp in M’bera whose capacity was originally 70,000.[3]

It might be tempting to view these two forms of human mobility in isolation from one another; the movement of people to the Canary Islands could be deemed unauthorised economic migration, while the influx of people from war-torn northern Mali are refugee flows. Indeed, distinct elements of the global migration and border regime have intervened in Mauritania to manage these two forms of movement. Spain and the EU have taken the lead in cooperating with the Mauritanian state in attempting to manage and suppress migration to the Canary Islands, most recently in the form of a €210 million migration partnership deal signed in March of this year.[4] The UNHCR, meanwhile, is Mauritania’s primary partner in the management of the M’bera camp and in refugee support and integration programmes across national territory. Add to this the geographic dimension of this separation – “irregular” economic migrants leave Mauritania from its western maritime border for Spain, while refugees enter from Malia via its eastern border, over 1,200 km away – and this schematic opposition would appear complete.

As far as lived experience is concerned, however, this distinction is not always so tangible.[5] Within my research on EU external border policy in Mauritania, I have encountered Malians from Timbuktu and Mopti who had been intercepted at sea by EU-supported North African coast guards, and who remained unable to return home due to the security situation in their home regions.[6] Additionally, a recent investigation by Lighthouse Reports has unveiled a widespread practice of people being deported to Mali after being detained in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.[7] It also shows that these deportation operations are conducted using vehicles acquired in the framework of EU support to migration management in Mauritania. In other words, people are policed as “irregular” migrants within the framework of EU border externalisation policies before being deported to a conflict zone that many others are fleeing. In each case, the experiential line between migrant and refugee blurs, meaning – amongst other things – that people who could have a credible asylum claim to make are detained and deported as “irregular migrants.”

What is at stake in this experiential overlap between illegalised economic migration and the governance of refugees and asylum seekers? The externalisation of asylum is generally understood to occur when states outsource “key elements of their own asylum systems by transferring asylum seekers who have arrived in their jurisdiction to another State for the purpose of determining their refugee status and, in some cases, providing them with territorial asylum there.”[8] In Mauritania, however, there is as yet no national asylum law in place. A draft asylum law has been in the wings for some time but has yet to be adopted, the stated reason being an absence of national capacity to independently administer an asylum system.[9] For this reason, the UNHCR holds sole responsibility for refugee status determination in the refugee camp in M’bera. Elsewhere in the country, people who may have an asylum case to make are often themselves detained and deported as illegalised economic migrants, denied the opportunity to travel to a jurisdiction with an effective asylum system in place.

Rather than an externalisation of asylum policy per se, then, might there be in Mauritania an emergent regime of asylum seeker and refugee containment? In what follows, I first sketch a genealogy of the policy areas of migration policing and refugee protection in Mauritania, highlighting a growing institutional overlap between them. I then detail the underlying logic of containment that is driving this merger. I conclude with a reflection on the potential effects of this logic of refugee containment.

A genealogy of migration policing and refugee protection in Mauritania

In a government policy paper outlining Mauritania’s approach to refugee protection and accommodation[10], it is observed that this area falls within a more general framework of migration management in the country, one spelled out in the country’s national migration strategy.[11] Written up by a team of European technical experts in 2009 before being adopted by the government in 2010, this national migration strategy represented an effort on the part of the EU to instil a comprehensive approach to migration management within Mauritanian national institutions. This effort, in turn, came as a long-term response to an increase in arrivals on the Canary Islands in 2006, the initial Spanish and EU response to which involved deployments of Spanish and Frontex naval and aerial missions off the coasts of West Africa.[12] At the same time, an old school in the northern port city of Nouadhibou was converted into a detention centre with Spanish funding, in order to detain and deport those intercepted at sea or detained in the city. This move was widely criticised at the time, due to the negative implications it had for the right to asylum.[13]

Partly as a result of this negative attention, the detention centre was closed in 2012. The same year, a biometric residence permit was rolled out for foreign nationals Mauritania, which was soon followed by a flurry of raids, detentions and deportation operations across Mauritania’s urban centres. While the new residence permit formed part of a broader biometric overhaul of the country’s civil registry system, the Mauritanian government framed the raids and deportations that ensued in terms of “managing irregular migration.”[14] Media outlets also drew connections between these campaigns and the EU-impelled drive to prevent Europe-bound migration.[15] With arrivals on the Canary Islands momentarily quelled and the national strategy adopted by the government, this campaign of detention and deportation indicates that by 2012, the externalisation process that was initiated in 2006 had been thoroughly absorbed within Mauritanian state institutions.

Around the same time, a coup d’état in Mali and subsequent resurgence of conflict in the north of the country resulted in an increase in refugees entering eastern Mauritania’s Hodh al-Chargui region. To accommodate them, the M’bera refugee camp was constructed by the UNHCR in coordination with the government and other partner organisations. By June 2012, 74,000 refugees had been registered in the camp.[16] For much of the intervening period, the government took a backseat, with international agencies such as the UNHCR and MSF taking the lead in service provision and camp management. This began to change between 2018 and 2020, when the government began to integrate refugees within a range of national systems, from health and education to social insurance schemes. The UNHCR still fulfils a central role in this arrangement, however, due to the ongoing absence of asylum legislation in Mauritania mentioned above. While the UNHCR decides upon refugee status for those entering M’bera, the Mauritanian government delivers the documentation through the same biometric civil registry agency which issues biometric residence permits for foreign nationals.

As a result, there is an increasing institutional overlap between the policing of “irregular migration” and the administration of refugee protection in Mauritania. In July 2022, the government announced a regularisation campaign for foreign nationals in the country.[17] In practice, this meant waiving the registration fee and documents required to obtain a residence permit, and inviting foreign nationals who did not have documentation to enrol at civil registry centres set up for the four-month duration of the campaign. According to the policy paper on refugee protection and accommodation, this process aided in the identification of asylum seekers who would otherwise have been at risk of detention and deportation.[18] It also states that a campaign of registering refugees in the Hodh al-Chargui province was undertaken by the civil registry at the same time, and followed a similar logic.[19] What might this formal logic be? And is there a deeper unstated logic at play?

Institutional logics, stated and unstated

The formal logic of this institutional overlap between migration management and refugee protection appears to be one of identification and statistical knowledge production. With the registration of all foreign nationals on state territory – be they “economic migrants”, asylum seekers, or refugees – the government and its international partners acquired a numerical picture of the residing population, an imperative that inheres in the state form, as James Scott once memorably suggested.[20] Indeed, in addition to the identification of asylum seekers, the 2022 regularisation exercise generated a statistical picture of the wider migrant population, whom it estimated to stand at 136,000 based on the number of those registered. This estimate soon appeared in European Council documents making the case for the migration partnership deal that was signed in March 2024.[21] This deal, in turn, envisions amongst its five priority areas the strengthening of Mauritania’s international protection and asylum system.[22] In other words, the policing of migration and asylum seeker and refugee protection are increasingly being executed through the same institutional structures and frameworks.

In this light, a more discreet underlying logic of containment can be seen in the institutional overlap between refugee protection and migration policing. Indeed, from at least the 2015 EU Trust Fund for Africa and its emphasis upon “root causes of irregular migration”, the lines between migration management, refugee protection, military operations and development interventions have become increasingly blurred.[23] This is reflective of a more general overlap between international development projects and national security interests, which Mark Duffield terms the liberal way of development.[24] For him, international interventions of various kinds cohere around the goal of upholding a global ‘life-chance divide’, which is achieved through the containment of perceived security threats in the Global South. While this liberal way of development has a long history, he suggests the policing and containment of unauthorised migration to hold unprecedented priority within it today. This results in what Hanno Brankamp and Zoltán Glück identify as an imbrication between local security concerns and Euro-American funded policies that merge “counterterrorism with ‘humanitarian’ containment of migration at the global margins.”[25] This can be seen plainly in the recent reinforcement of the EU-Mauritania partnership, which, in addition to the €210 million worth of support for migration management programmes, also promised a €40 million package of support to equip a counterterror battalion and reinforce a military camp in the country.[26]

Beyond logic: the effects of containment

Beyond the stated logic of statistical knowledge production and its unstated corollary of containment, the institutional overlap between migration management and refugee protection may have unforeseen effects. As is the case in the region more widely, officials and populations often perceive the externalisation of migration and asylum policies to be neo-colonial in content and character.[27] In Mauritania, officials have to me lambasted the EU’s treatment of the country as “the gendarme of Europe”, and have emphasised the risks to national sovereignty posed by engagement with externalisation policies. As far as popular sentiment is concerned, the March 2024 migration partnership deal was opposed by many, with the police cracking down on protests against it on the day it was signed.[28] And while the accommodation of refugees has not been as hotly contested, the army was deployed to the market town of Bassikounou following riots and protests in the wake of the alleged killing of a Mauritanian national by a Malian refugee.[29]

More broadly, as the M’bera camp exceeds capacity and a UNHCR strategy of encouraging those seeking refuge to settle in communities is adopted, the protection gap that the government identified in its discussion of the 2022 regularisation campaign is likely to widen. With the out-of-camp and urban refugee and asylum seeker population growing rapidly in Mauritania, there is an ever growing cohort of people likely to fall victim to the forms of detention, expulsion and desert abandonment documented by the LHR investigation. And while most of those entering Mauritania via its southern border with Mali in 2022 were reported to be travelling for reasons of economic hardship[30], the proliferation of extremist activity in the area since make it likely that increasing numbers will be fleeing physical violence.[31] Such a situation further undermines the EU’s declared commitment to international protection principles, but it is perfectly consistent with the logic of containment at play within the institutional overlap between migration policing and refugee governance.

Footnotes

[1] Spanish Interior Ministry, “INMIGRACIÓN IRREGULAR 2024,” 2024, https://www.interior.gob.es/opencms/export/sites/default/.galleries/galeria-de-prensa/documentos-y-multimedia/balances-e-informes/2024/02_informe_quincenal_acumulado_01-01_al_31-01-2024.pdf.

[2] Okba Mohammad and Javier Jennings Mozo, “Deaths on Migration Route to Canary Islands Soar to 1,000 a Month,” The New Humanitarian, 2024, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2024/06/19/deaths-migration-route-canary-islands-spain-soar-1000-month.

[3] UNHCR, “Mauritania: Country Operation,” Global Focus: UNHCR Operations Worldwide, 2024, https://reporting.unhcr.org/operational/operations/mauritania#:~:text=Given the political instability%2C impacts,2023 to 246%2C000 in 2026.

[4] Amal El Ouassif, “Le Partenariat Union Européenne-Mauritanie : Le Contexte, Les Enjeux et Les Défis,” 2024, https://doi.org/10.1515/9782760624030-004.

[5] Heaven Crawley and Dimitris Skleparis, “Refugees, Migrants, Neither, Both: Categorical Fetishism and the Politics of Bounding in Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis,’” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 1 (2018): 48–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1348224.

[6] Hassan Ould Moctar, “The Constitutive Outside: EU Border Externalisation , Regional Histories , and Social Dynamics in the Senegal River Valley,” Geoforum, no. September (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.09.009; Hassan Ould Moctar, forthcoming, “Europeanisation, Border Violence, and Counterinsurgency: Expanded Geographies and Re-Connected Histories across the Sahelo-Sahara and the Mediterranean,” in Europeanisation as Violence: Souths and Easts as Method, ed. Kolar Kolar, Daria Krivonos, and Elisa Pascucci (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

[7] Lighthouse Reports, “Desert Dumps,” 2024, https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/desert-dumps/.

[8] David Cantor et al., “Externalisation, Access to Territorial Asylum, and International Law,” International Journal of Refugee Law 34, no. 1 (2022): 120–56, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eeac023.

[9] Pledges and Contributions – Mauritania, ‘Global Compact on Refugees’ https://globalcompactrefugees.org/pledges-contributions

[10] Ministère de l’Economie et du Développement – République Islamique de la Mauritanie, “LETTRE DE POLITIQUE DE DÉVELOPPEMENT SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS ET COMMUNAUTÉS D’ACCUEIL,” 2023, 1–26.

[11] Islamic Republic of Mauritania, “Stratégie Nationale de Gestion de La Migration,” 2010.

[12] Sergio Carrera, “The EU Border Management Strategy: FRONTEX and the Challenges of Irregular Immigration in the Canary Islands,” CEPS Working Document 261 (2007), https://doi.org/http://www.ceps.eu.

[13] Amnesty International, “Mauritania: ‘Nobody Wants to Have Anything to Do with Us’” (London, 2008); Oumar Kane, “Les Maures et Le Futa-Toro Au XVIIIe Siècle.,” Cahiers d’études Africaines 14, no. 54 (1974): 237–52, https://doi.org/10.3406/cea.1974.2643; CEAR-EUSKADI, “The Externalization of Borders: Migration Control and the Right To Asylum – A Framework for Advocacy,” 2013, https://idcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/INCIDENCIA_OK_ENGLISH.pdf.

[14] Hamadou Boulama et al., “Axe Rosso-Nouakchott: Des Mobilites En Danger. Rapport d’observation à La Frontière Sénégal – Mauritanie,” 2017, https://www.lacimade.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Loujna_Axe_Rosso_Nouakchott.pdf.

[15] Mamadou Thiam, “Les Migrants Damnés de La Terre Mauritanienne : La Carte de Séjour Ou Le Parcours Du Combattant,” Le Calame, August 18, 2016, http://www.lecalame.info/?q=node/4392.

[16] UNHCR, “Mauritania,” Operational Data Portal, 2023, https://data.unhcr.org/en/country/mrt.

[17] Oumlbenina Mint Bamba, “Mauritanie : Les Ressortissants Étrangers Appelés à Régulariser Leur Séjour,” Kassataya, September 24, 2022, https://kassataya.com/2022/09/24/mauritanie-les-ressortissants-etrangers-appeles-a-regulariser-leur-sejour/.

[18] Direction Générale des Politiques et Stratégies de Développement – Ministère de l’Economie et du Développement, “LETTRE DE POLITIQUE DE DÉVELOPPEMENT SUR LES RÉFUGIÉS ET COMMUNAUTÉS D’ACCUEIL,” 2023, p. 9.

[19] Ibid.

[20] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London: Yale University Press, 1998).

[21] Migration-control.info, “Migratory Situation in Mauritania,” 2023, https://migration-control.info/en/blog/migratory-situation-in-mauretania/.

[22] European Commission, “Joint Declaration Establishing a Migration Partnership Between Mauritania and the European Union,” 2024, https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/eu-mauritania-joint-declaration_en.

[23] Luca Raineri and Francesco Strazzari, “(B)Ordering Hybrid Security? EU Stabilisation Practices in the Sahara-Sahel Region,” Ethnopolitics 18, no. 5 (2019): 544–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2019.1640509; Elisa Lopez-Lucia, “The European Union Integrated and Regionalised Approach towards the Sahel,” Centre FrancoPaix En Résolution Des Conflits et Missions de Paix, no. February (2019).

[24] Mark Duffield, “The Liberal Way of Development and the Development-Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide,” Security Dialogue 41, no. 1 (2010): 53–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010609357042.

[25] Hanno Brankamp and Zoltán Glück, “Camps and Counterterrorism: Security and the Remaking of Refuge in Kenya,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221093070.

[26] European Union, “EU-Mauritania Partnership,” 2024, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/FS_24_702.

[27] Laura Lambert, “No Solution for Torture Prisons. Anti-Racist Resistance to Emergency Evacuations to Niger,” Externalizing Asylum, 2024, https://externalizingasylum.info/no-solution-for-torture-prisons-anti-racist-resistance-to-emergency-evacuations-to-niger/.

[28] Moulaye Najim, “Migrants : L’accord Mauritanie-UE Ne Fait Pas l’unanimité,” Africa News, 2024, https://fr.africanews.com/2024/03/13/migrants-laccord-mauritanie-ue-ne-fait-pas-lunanimite/.

[29] Maya Agaly, “Bassiknou : Retour Au Calme Dans La Rue Après l’intervention de l’armée,” Taqadoumy, 2024, https://fr.taqadoumy.mr/archives/18080.

[30] Flore Berger, “‘Mali: Human Smuggling Resilient in the Face of Instability’, Human Smuggling and Trafficking Ecosystems – North Africa and the Sahel” (Geneva, 2024), https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Flore-Berger-Mali-Human-smuggling-resilient-in-the-face-of-instability-GI-TOC-June-2023.final_.pdf.

[31] Of course, this is to say nothing of the violence of economic abandonment and destitution which people were already fleeing.