Chapter 7 looks at humanitarian projects assisting migrants in the Moroccan borderlands. I argue that the fast violence pervading the border allows us to see the inclusionary-exclusionary stance of the aid apparatus in a clearer light. It shows that aid sustains the rise of a silent, threatened apparatus of emergency relief. Donor-funded projects providing humanitarian assistance to migrants enter a symbiotic relation with border violence. Although abuses against migrants perpetually trigger humanitarian intervention, NGOs and IOs engage in a form of “minimal biopolitics”, that mitigates migrants’ death without fully investing in life.

This chapter reviews the complex evidence for differing conceptions of the locus of cognitive and affective faculties that have been entertained, as reported in modern ethnography and in the evidence for ancient societies such as Greece and China. The contrast between physicality and interiority that Descola uses to draw up a taxonomy of ontological regimes is subject to qualifications insofar as mind–body dualism is only one of a number of schemata that are to be found across cultures.

This chapter investigates the problems posed by the difficulties of 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.

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.

Chapter 5 shows that aid facilitates the creation of a political architecture of control that pushes refugee people into self-disciplining behaviours, in the hope to be seen by aid agencies as conforming to a certain style of refugeehood. Specifically, I look at projects favouring migrant labour integration to show that migrant people can be attracted to or can decide to distance themselves from aid-funded projects for reasons that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the initiative (in this case, favouring migrants’ integration into the labour market). Rather, the structural constraints characterising the life of migrant people in Morocco (lack of legal mobility avenues, lack of access to public services, lack of access to decent work) pushes project beneficiaries to read aid-funded projects as disciplinary tools through which aid agencies can observe their behaviours.

The Introduction presents the argument, theoretical approach, and methods underpinning the study of aid as migration control in Morocco. I argue that aid marks the rise of a substantially different mode of migration containment, one where power works beyond fast violence, and its disciplinary potential is augmented precisely by its elusiveness. I build on Foucault’s analytic of power to develop a framework that explains the coexistence of fast techniques of bordering with emerging instruments of indirect and elusive rule. I then build on Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of the ‘quasi-event’ to complicate our understanding of ‘benevolence’, ‘malevolence’, and co-optation into borderwork. I emphasise that the elusiveness of aid makes containment less visible and thus more difficult to resist for the actors orbiting around the aid industry. I compound these different threads of analysis into a discussion about power relations in the governance of the border.

Figures 5.1 and 5.2 give the simplest forms of the epicyclic and eccentric models respectively. In Figure 5.1 the planet (or sun or moon) (P) moves round the circumference of an epicycle, whose centre (C) itself moves round the circumference of what is called the deferent circle whose centre E is the earth. The sense of the movement of a planet on its epicycle is the same as that of the deferent circle, while for the sun and moon, which do not exhibit retrogradation, the two circles move in opposite senses.

Chapter 4 examines how the entanglement between care and control transforms aid into a tool that filters marginalisation without directly excluding migrants from basic service provision. By looking at projects providing social assistance to migrants living in the big Moroccan urban centres, I argue that aid rather mediates the marginalisation of migrants through their inclusion in a parallel network of care. Developing in the interstices of a tight border and of an indifferent Moroccan state, this care is volatile: it rests on bureaucratised logics of filtering that normalise the abandonment of migrants. This care is also unaccountable: the actors providing assistance enact mechanisms which allow them not to see themselves as responsible for migrants’ grievances.

The Conclusion retraces the argument foregrounded in the book. It reflects on recent events in border control cooperation between the EU and Morocco, and casts attention on future developments, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter also identifies future research avenues and formulates policy recommendations for development and humanitarian practitioners.

Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? This book offers a novel answer to this question by looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa: local actors are better able to cooperate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms of appropriate comportment in the public sphere demarcated by group boundaries. In this introductory chapter, I lay out the main contours of my theory as well as the implications that the argument holds for key debates in Comparative Politics, including the use of narratives as a lens into actors’ political strategies, the social identities we prioritize in our research, prospects for state-building in sub-Saharan Africa, and our understanding of how historical legacies shape contemporary development outcomes.

One of the central claims of this study is that the impact of informal social institutions is contingent on the formal institutional environment they operate within. This chapter looks at the historical trajectory of basic public goods investments in Senegal from the onset of colonial rule in 1880 to the present to evaluate this claim by extending the dataset on village-level public goods access backward in time to the onset of French colonial rule using archival data and ministerial reports. By so "decompressing" history, the analysis unpacks spatial and temporal processes to isolate the 1996 decentralization reforms as the moment that precolonial legacies emerge to shape the spatial distribution of local public goods access. At the same time, the historical dataset allows me to take into account prominent historical alternative explanations that suggest enduring colonial legacies might supersede the precolonial effects I document. I find that the colonial past did matter, but that its effects on access to rural public goods have largely faded by the era of decentralization.

Chapter 2 introduces the core antecedent condition under study: Senegal’s precolonial political geography. The chapter delineates the differences between areas that were home to precolonial states and those that lacked centralized political structures prior to colonization before introducing my strategy for measuring the territorial extent of Senegal’s precolonial kingdoms. The chapter then explains why these states left enduring legacies despite French colonial ambitions, migration induced by the introduction of a cash crop economy, and the religious conversion, notably the rise of Sufi Islamic practice by identifying the mechanisms of persistence: the enduring nature of village-based social hierarchies that have proven remarkably adaptable to these challenges.

Chapter 3 introduces Senegal’s decentralization reforms in depth, specifying the transfer of authority over basic social services to the local state in 1996. Because it is possible that the very process of delimiting decentralized units allowed more coherent communities to select into shared administrative divisions, I have to take into account the possibility that institutional congruence was not simply an outcome of the precolonial past, but available to any group able to influence boundary construction. Accordingly, the chapter details the politics of subnational boundary creation from the colonial onward. Employing archival and interview data, I demonstrate that decentralization and boundary delimitation were largely top-down processes, suggesting that the emergence of institutional congruence was not driven by endogenous, bottom-up demand.