CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
Criminologies, Borders, and Humanities in North Africa
An Edited Volume for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series
Editor: Dr. Rachid Benharrousse*

*Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Email: rachid.benharrousse@proton.me


About the Series

This volume is proposed for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series: an interdisciplinary and inclusive space that examines how laws, policies, and practices shape, regulate, and contest borders and the people affected by them.

By fostering co-production and employing creative methodologies, the series highlights diverse voices, including those of marginalised communities. Its aims are to provide a platform for innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship on borders and criminalisation; to amplify marginalised voices and lived experiences in the context of border policies and practices; to foster critical engagement with contemporary issues surrounding migration, surveillance, and social justice; and to promote co-production of knowledge by bridging academic and non-academic perspectives.


About the Volume

We invite chapter proposals for Criminologies, Borders, and Humanities in North Africa, a new edited volume that brings together interdisciplinary scholarship examining the intersections of border enforcement, criminalisation, and humanistic inquiry across North Africa, a region that remains critically underrepresented in border criminology scholarship despite its central position in contemporary migration governance.

North African countries, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Mauritania, occupy a pivotal role in the architecture of global border control. They function simultaneously as countries of origin, transit, and destination for people on the move, while also serving as key partners in the European Union's externalisation strategy. While most forced mobility is within the Global South or of people moving from the South to the North, scholarship in border criminology has predominantly been UK/US or Australia-centric. This volume directly addresses that imbalance by centring North Africa.

The urgency of this project is underscored by recent developments. Over the past two years, the EU has pursued a controversial migration deal with Tunisia, worth up to €1 billion, positioning it as a model for future partnerships with North African countries. The deal has drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups, MEPs, and even the EU Ombudsman, with reports linking EU funding to grave abuses against sub-Saharan migrants in Tunisia, including arbitrary detention, desert expulsions, and violence by security forces. In Libya, a U.N. report called for a moratorium on the return of migrant boats to the country until human rights are ensured. The European Union and its member states continued to support Libyan Coast Guard forces, providing supplies, technical support, and aerial surveillance. In Morocco, Law 02-03 on the entry and residence of foreigners extensively criminalizes irregular migration under the pretext of protecting public order and public security. Meanwhile, the European Commission took a significant step in April–May 2025 by proposing the first common EU list of "safe third countries of return," which includes Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt.

This volume builds on the editor's prior work examining how the lack of adequate institutional and governmental infrastructure in Morocco shapes a necropolitical paradigm, and how the nation-state wields pre-migratory expectations as political weapons in border control and migration policies, contextualising irregular migration within the historical, economic, and political developments of Morocco. It seeks to expand this analytical lens across the North African region by combining border criminology perspectives with law and humanities approaches. It centres marginalised voices, lived experiences, and creative methodologies alongside critical legal, institutional, and policy analysis. Border criminology has deep and widely spread intellectual roots, which connect it to a range of debates in feminist theory, refugee and immigration studies, postcolonial studies, human rights, immigration and refugee law, and critical race scholarship. This volume contributes to that trajectory by expanding it into the North African context.


Themes and Topics

We welcome chapter proposals addressing — but not limited to — the following themes within the North African context:
Criminalisation of migration: Legal frameworks, policing practices, and institutional mechanisms through which migration is criminalised in North African states, including the interplay between domestic law and EU-driven externalisation pressures.
Detention and deportation regimes: The operation, governance, and lived experience of immigration detention and deportation across the region, including formal and informal sites of confinement.
EU externalisation and border partnerships: Critical analysis of bilateral and multilateral agreements between the EU and North African states — including the EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding, EU-Libya cooperation, EU-Morocco border management arrangements, and recent EU deals with Egypt and Mauritania — and their consequences for human rights and migration governance.
"Safe third country" designations and their implications: The impact of the EU's proposed common list of safe countries of return on North African states and on people seeking protection.
Necropolitics, infrastructure, and pre-migratory expectations: How inadequate institutional and governmental infrastructure, structural inequality, and necropolitical logics shape the conditions that drive irregular migration and inform the pre-migratory imaginaries of youth in North Africa.
Surveillance, technology, and digital borders: The transfer, deployment, and impact of surveillance technologies, biometric systems, and digitalised border management across North Africa.
Colonial legacies and postcolonial bordering: Historical continuities between colonial border-making and contemporary migration enforcement, and postcolonial and decolonial critiques of border governance in the region.
Gender, race, and intersectionality at the border: How gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and other axes of identity shape experiences of criminalisation, border violence, and resistance.
Lived experiences and testimonies: First-person narratives, biographical accounts, and testimonial approaches that centre the voices and subjectivities of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and affected communities.
Arts-based and creative methodologies: The use of literature, poetry, visual art, photography, film, theatre, and other creative forms to document, analyse, and contest border violence.
Law and humanities approaches: Literary, narrative, and cultural analysis of legal texts, policies, and practices related to borders and migration in North Africa.
Civil society, legal advocacy, and resistance: The role of NGOs, legal practitioners, migrant-led movements, and solidarity networks in challenging criminalisation and defending rights.
Mobility justice and alternative futures: Conceptual and practical explorations of mobility justice, regularisation, decriminalisation of migration, and alternative frameworks for governing human movement in and beyond North Africa.
Saharan and sub-Saharan migration corridors: Border governance, enforcement, and migration experiences along North Africa's southern frontiers and trans-Saharan routes, including mass deportations and abandonment practices.
Emotions, affect, and bordering: How emotional and affective dynamics shape, sustain, and resist bordering practices — both institutionally and personally — across North African contexts.
We particularly encourage contributions that employ innovative, creative, or participatory methodologies; chapters co-authored with or informed by the perspectives of migrants, refugees, and affected communities; work that bridges disciplinary boundaries between criminology, law, the humanities, and the social sciences; and contributions from early career researchers and those from underrepresented backgrounds.


Submission Guidelines

Interested contributors should submit a chapter proposal consisting of:

Chapter title
Abstract (300–500 words) outlining the chapter's argument, methodology, empirical basis, and contribution to the volume's themes
Author(s) details: Full name(s), institutional affiliation(s), email address(es), and a brief biography (100 words per author)
Estimated word count (chapters should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including references)
Please send proposals to rachid.benharrousse@proton.me with the subject line: "Chapter Proposal_Last Name"
Deadline for abstract submission is 31st March 2026. Full chapters are expceted to be submited by 30th August 2026.