Reframing coercive engineered migration theory: Ceuta and the Western Sahara

Abstract

By opening the gates on the border to Ceuta in May 2021, Morocco explicitly engaged in coercive engineered migration (CEM) to establish a tradeoff of sovereignty claims over the Spanish exclave city and the Western Sahara territory. In this article, we test Greenhill’s theory on why stronger liberal democratic states yield to this strategy by weaker autocratic states against the public debate in Spain on how the government devolved the migrants and relinquished the future of its ex-colony in the desert, with evidence from the mass media, official documents and personal interviews. We offer an alternative conceptual model for CEM by critically recalibrating factors within her domestic account and shifting the focus to geopolitical considerations. We argue that externalization of border control has tended to blur expected differences among political regimes, reducing the risk of ideological polarization and hypocrisy costs, typical of democracies according to theory, and leaving fear of swamping of hosting resources as the main domestic explanation of successful CEM across regimes. It has embedded border control in multiple issue-linkages, increasing the leverage of countries of origin and transit in the multi-scalar international tapestry of migration diplomacy.