Tunisia and Marseille

Unpacking Mediterranean Borderlands: Transit and Confinement between Tunisia and Marseille

This project unpacks the Mediterranean borderlands in new and necessary ways by examining how borders are constituted between France and the Maghreb through practices of confinement beyond the formal carceral system. It explores how experiences of stuckness, immobility, and prolonged waiting shape everyday life across interconnected borderlands.

Over the past decades, migration and displacement of North and Sub-Saharan Africans across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe have generated intense political debate, public anxiety, and increasingly restrictive border regimes. In this context, the Mediterranean has come to function as an extended borderland linking Europe and Africa, one that, from the EU’s perspective, must be contained, managed, and policed. Rather than approaching the Mediterranean as a fixed line of separation, this project conceptualizes it as a socially and politically entangled borderland produced through migration governance, urban inequality, and everyday practices of survival.

Focusing on migrants and families with translocal ties between Tunisia and Marseille, the project examines how confinement animates and structures life in the borderlands. Drawing on ethnographic research in poor urban neighborhoods in Tunis and Marseille shaped by migration and marginalization, the project traces how experiences of transit-related confinement in North African contexts persist, mutate, and re-emerge after arrival in Europe. Practices of control and every day violence encountered during transit, bureaucratic uncertainty, legal precarity, suspended mobility, and enforced waiting, reappear in new forms through housing insecurity, racialized policing, and urban marginalization in European cities.

By linking North Africa and southern Europe through a relational, translocal perspective, this project contributes to CONFINED by demonstrating how confined lives are produced not only through incarceration or camps, but through everyday governance, urban marginality, and family relations that span the Mediterranean.

Meet the Researcher

My research examines how European border politics shape everyday life across North Africa and the wider Mediterranean. Over many years, I have conducted ethnographic research in Tunisia and, more recently, in Marseille, working with migrants, particularly Central and West Africans, who have experienced violence, prolonged waiting, immobilization, and bureaucratic uncertainty under contemporary migration regimes.

My work focuses on how violence, confinement, and control extend beyond formal border sites and continue to shape life after movement, including questions of legality, urban marginality, and belonging. I am particularly interested in how these dynamics unfold through institutions, urban conditions, and everyday practices of survival across interconnected sites in North Africa and southern Europe.

Conceptually, I have developed the notions of transit assemblages (Chemlali 2025) and felt externalization (Chemlali 2023) to capture how experiences formed during migration journeys persist over time and space. Through this work, I contribute to CONFINED by examining how confined lives are produced through translocal processes rather than isolated spaces such as camps or prisons.

I have published my academic research in journals including American Ethnologist, Geopolitics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS), Trends in Organized Crime, and Forced Migration Review, among others. I also write op-eds and public commentary on migration, borders, violence, and human rights for a wider audience, including contributions to the Los Angeles Times, The New Humanitarian, Border Criminologies, and other outlets.