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.

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.

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.