Presenter: Dr. Kheira Arrouche (Radical Humanities Laboratory)

A seminar hosted by the ISS21 Migration & Integration Research Cluster

The EU externalisation policies have reshaped migration across North Africa into a condition of indefinite, and precarious limbo. Algeria, situated along the Mediterranean migration corridor connecting Africa to Europe, has emerged as a key transit country. Yet for many West and Central African migrants, Algeria is not simply a stepping-stone, it is a place where mobility is curtailed, and settlement is denied. Migrants are caught in a paradoxical condition, neither fully in movement nor fully settled. Their lives marked by confinement, racial discrimination, and state violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with diverse group of migrants living under the condition of “illegality,” I examine how migrants experience time and space in cities such as Algiers and Oran. I argue that Algeria’s migration regime operates through a deliberate system of opaque containment—a mode of governance that manages mobility through informality, arbitrary enforcement, and racialised disposability rather than through formal legal or institutional mechanisms. This system renders migrants simultaneously extractable and expendable: a precarious labour force mobilised for economic needs and disposable subjects expelled or spatially dispersed once deemed threatening. Yet, despite deterrence strategies and expulsions, many migrants continue to return to Algeria, revealing the limits of state control and the persistence of mobility under constraint. Moreover, the research offers two main critical interventions: the first one examines retrospectively how people navigate and negotiate the racialized and stratified mobility regimes along the journey of border crossing to Algeria’s borderlands through an embodied and localized lens. The Second explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of being in transit, interrogating the interplay forces that make up movement and immobility in Algeria. My ethnographic approach bridges the micro and macro, foregrounding the lived and embodied experiences of migrants while situating them within broader stratified structural forces.