Haunting the border: passages, horizons and memories of disappearance in Morocco

This thesis examines how disappearance and death at the border continue to produce social, political, and affective effects beyond the moment of loss itself. Situated within disappearance studies and bringing a hauntological approach to bear on border and migration studies, it attends to how violent absence is produced at the border and to what it generates, in terms of political relations, practices of memory, and claims for justice. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily in Morocco within the ERC Solroutes project, the thesis traces the dynamics of border disappearance across three groups of actors: sub-Saharan people on the move, families of disappeared and dead Moroccan migrants, and solidarity actors. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and four Theatre of the Oppressed workshops, it follows the movement through which violent absence – lived intimately and collectively – is transformed into political claim-making and practices of visibility. The analytical framework mobilises haunting as analytical device, attending to the persistence of what has been removed, its obstinate return, and its capacity to unsettle the present. The border emerges as a space of incomplete removal, in which the disappeared continue to act upon the world through the practices of those who remain, generating disturbed intimacies, epistemic resistance, and public demands for truth and accountability. Absence, in this framework, is understood as a generative space from which alternative relations, imaginaries, and political possibilities take shape. The empirical chapters trace a trajectory from the intimate register of lived experience toward its socialised and collective dimensions. The fourth chapter examines how sub-Saharan people on the move inhabit and resist the condition of disappearability, and how the memory of lost travel companions constitutes an act of epistemic resistance within the collective experience of unauthorised movement. The fifth chapter attends to the families of disappeared Moroccan migrants, tracing how the private need to know is transformed into a public demand for truth through practices of memory, mourning, and political mobilisation. The sixth chapter interrogates the demand for truth and justice through two ethnographic cases of body recovery and repatriation, showing how the returning corpse unsettles rather than resolves the fractures produced by disappearance, activating new claims and new actors in the pursuit of accountability. In bringing together heterogeneous stories of haunting, the thesis maps a collective movement of contestation oriented toward challenging the border regime and imagining otherwise, arguing that a hauntological approach is capable of accounting for the depth and density of border violence, for the practices through which it is inhabited and contested, and for the political and imaginative possibilities that open within and beyond it.