Chapter 2 explores how aid constructs Morocco into an ‘Immigration Nation’, by fostering a hegemonic imaginary of immigration in the country as a predominantly ‘black’, ‘African’, and ‘irregular’ experience. This performance is subsumed by discourses and practices de-historicising immigration in Morocco and normalising the idea of ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ as the main group of foreigners living in the country. This escalates the political attention over Western and Central African migration to levels which are not supported by demographic data. I identify two critical junctures that allowed the migration industry to consolidate narratives of ‘transit’ migration throughout the country, trivialising projects targeting ‘sub-Saharan migrants’ along the major stopovers of migrant routes in Morocco.

This chapter explores four different types of explanatory factors that might be invoked to account for the emergence of different groups of scientific theories, ontologies or cosmologies, namely ecology, language, technology and socio-political factors. It arrives at the negative conclusion that none of these singly nor all four taken in conjunction allow us to predict and explain the world-views and modes of scientific investigation that the historical record and the ethnographic data provide evidence for. The varying trajectories of the different developments that we encounter thus demand nuanced particular analysis.

This chapter accepts that biomedicine is the dominant influence on our ideas about health and disease but considers what qualifications need to be introduced to do justice first to the more complicated issues to do with mental health and then to the very diverse conceptions that have been entertained in this area in non-Western societies, ancient and modern. Drawing on Hacking’s work on natural kinds and Luhrmann’s analysis of the uncertainties of modern psychiatry, it suggests further respects in which we need to exercise caution in assessing competing claims for expertise in this area.

Chapter 6 examines the Assistance to Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programme run by the IOM. I argue that the AVRR elusively expands the deportation capacity of countries of ‘transit’. I label the function played by aid as elusive because the AVRR is not coercively imposed by the IOM or European states on Moroccan authorities, countries of origin, or migrants. Moroccan authorities consider it a cheaper and more diplomatically acceptable alternative to deportations. Embassies of countries of origin see it as an economically advantageous way to outsource assistance to their citizens abroad in distress. Migrants themselves see it as a last resort opportunity in case things go wrong in Morocco – or so argue IOM officers.

This chapter summarises certain conclusions concerning the scientific endeavours of different cultures at different periods. Cross-cultural understanding is fraught with difficulty but the recognition that there is no neutral vocabulary available in which to undertake our analyses does not mean that all mutual understanding is beyond reach. However, traditional views of the contrast between the literal and the metaphorical should be replaced by an acceptance of the pervasiveness of semantic stretch. Cross-cultural explorations provide an opportunity to examine our own preconceptions, including about the scope of science and the values it implies – and so also of its history.

This chapter introduces the key theme of the book, which is to challenge the dominant agenda in the history of science which concentrates on developments in the West since the seventeenth century. Once we focus on aims and methods rather than on results, the explorations of the members of ancient societies and of modern indigenous groups can be given due attention. Their different approaches offer us the opportunity to revise our own assumptions and so expand the horizons of the history of science.

Chapter 1 provides the contextual background for the rest of the monograph. It retraces patterns of immigration into Morocco and discusses how processes of bordering securitised the presence and movement of people profiled as ‘sub-Saharan migrants’. I reconstruct the tightening of borders in the Western Mediterranean, highlighting the efforts undertaken by European countries to prevent the irregular movement of people and the border externalisation process which accompanied such a project. I discuss the involvement of Moroccan authorities in the bordering and militarisation of the Western Mediterranean, outlining the main developments that occurred in the domestic migration policy strategy. The end of the chapter provides an overview of the actors involved in the aid industry.

This chapter examines the varying roles that definitions may play in scientific investigations. Obviously they may laudably aim at clarifying the problem to be explored, but the demand and search for univocal definitions can have a limiting effect on the inquiry subsequently pursued. When a definition is presented as the goal of an investigation, for example of the characteristics of an animal species, that may have the effect of obscuring some of the complexities that may be uncovered along the way. The problem of the role of definitions in an axiomatic system such as Euclid’s lies in their presumed self-evidence.

Chapter 3 examines how aid creates conflicts and entrenches existing racialised inequalities within the civil society sector. I show that funding injections shake Moroccan civil society by producing three kinds of organisational subjectivities. The first group are the newcomers, which decide to accept donors’ funding, while enacting sense-making strategies to justify their work as not explicitly in support of border security policies. The second group are the radicals: organisations which consider aid money as an instrument of border externalisation, and therefore decide to reject it or distance themselves from it. The last group of civil society organisations are those remaining on the doorstep. Mainly migrant-led organisations, these actors aspire to be part of the aid industry but are unable to bid for aid-funded projects and are confined to play a subordinate role in the migration market. Funding injections therefore alter relations between civil society organisations by favouring phenomena of co-optation, conflict, and subordination. This leads to the emergence of conflict among civil society actors, who do not manage to take a unified stance in favour or against the border regime.

translation across different natural languages and conceptual systems. While there is no totally neutral vocabulary in which this can be effected, this does not mean that mutual understanding is quite beyond reach, although that will depend on allowing for the revisability of some of the initial preconceptions in play. Comparing divergent schemata is indeed an important means of expanding the horizons of the history of science.