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.

Chapter 4 turns to martyr mothers in Maxmûr. This camp, with its violent history, is highly militarised and a place where the boundaries between the armed and civil spheres are non-existent. Almost every week someone from the camp falls at one of the many frontlines in the region, while the families in the camps, and especially the mothers, continue to live life according to the party’s liberation ideology. I show how the militant mothers of the camp play an integral part in continuing not only camp life but the struggle for freedom according to the PKK more broadly. I map out three key sites of daily life for mothers: first, the martyr house and death wakes; second, camp work; and third, the private house. Throughout I discuss how mothers organise and perform rituals of mourning, remembrance and resistance. Hereby, the martyr culture is a key location where a sense of belonging and sacrifice but also a vision and hope for a future nation are negotiated.

This chapter argues that the some of the huge Kurdish population in western Turkey forms an Internal Diaspora. It introduces the concept of the Internal Diaspora by discussing the literature in relation to international diasporas. It then proceeds to discuss the challenges in assessing how many Kurds live outside of their Kurdish homeland in western Turkey. It tracks multiple generations of Kurdish migration, and the issues migrants were confronted with in western cities. It highlights some of the lived experiences for Kurds in the West such as poverty, racist exclusion, diminishing economic opportunities and patterns of informal residential segregation, especially in gecekondu neighbourhoods. It then proceeds to analyse how and why the PKK first mobilised in western Turkey, as well as considering how the mobilisation contrasted with that in Kurdish regions. It demonstrates that Kurdish students became the organisational core of the movement before expanding into marginal neighbours populated by destitute Kurds. It also looks at the decline of the revolutionary Turkish left and takes the case of the Gaziosmanpaşa neighbourhood as an illustrative case study. It finishes with a discussion of the parliamentary Kurdish parties and how it affected the PKK mobilization.

This chapter introduces the book's main theoretical argument: that armed groups are dependent on popular support and accordingly strive to obtain and maintain it, efforts which shape insurgents’ repertoire of contention. It outlines the concept of the 'constituency' (Malthaner 2011) which serves as a relational framework to understand the dynamic relations between insurgent groups and their supporters. It further develops the concept by more explicitly developing its spatial dimensions. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of insurgent movements use of space and how it shapes interactions with their supporters. It embeds this theoretical approach in the broader literatures concerned with insurgent groups’ relations with civilians, ranging from counterinsurgency and social movements to rebel governance. It argues that the paradigm of territorial control (Kalyvas, 2006) is too reductive and cannot account for patterns of support for insurgents in areas they do not control. It also addresses the critical role of the state in shaping insurgent behaviour and how state–insurgent interactions are reciprocally formative. It proceeds to look at issues of insurgent governance, recruitment and civilian agency.

This chapter historically contextualises the Kurdish women’s movement and traces the trajectory of its organisational structures and knowledge production from 1978 to the present. It situates the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its local political and armed branches in the regional and international matrices of domination: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It zooms in on the main internal rupture points where the women resisted and fought against their male comrades in order to build their autonomous ranks within the larger liberation movement.

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.

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.

‘When I struggle for my freedom with women, I feel free and I feel equal. Maybe if we weren’t organised, I wouldn’t feel like that. But freedom is so far away, that I know, we need hundreds of years’ (Ayşe Gökkan, 14 November 2015). We were sitting in the office of KJA, the Congress of Free Women (Kongreya Jinên Azad) in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey, when Ayşe Gökkan told me what equality and freedom meant to her. Our interview was often interrupted by the war planes roaring overhead and rattling the windows,1 Ayşe’s phone ringing and people walking into her office for a quick consultation.