Transitional African Spaces in Comparative Analysis: inclusion, exclusion and informality in Morocco and Cape Verde

Departing from the idea that the externalisation of the EU's immigration policy has been tacitly accepted and even incorporated in the legal corpus of nations around the Mediterranean basin, this study argues that the southern European boundary has been redrawn, and gradually dislocated southwards to establish a new de facto border in northern and western Africa. The study adopts a comparative analysis evaluating the social effects of this novel geopolitical dynamic in two of Europe's closest neighbours, Morocco and the Cape Verde Islands, and focuses on the quasi-involuntary development of a new migration paradigm in both countries, based on an informal incorporation nexus. This important change in local socio-political contexts primarily derives from a steady inflow of sub-Saharan migrants, and the challenges they pose to civility in two nations where civil society is only nascent. As passage to Europe becomes increasingly difficult, many migrants are transforming what were until recently two eminent migration source countries into ‘transit countries’, increasingly becoming hosts to permanent states of transience and liminality. Current legal categories used to identify these new migration flows, and the lack of adequate asylum discourses, are also problematised. The study further explores the nexus of inclusion and exclusion, and formal and informal modes of incorporation, of the ‘African other’.