Living on the Edge: Everyday Security in North African Borderlands

The shared border regions between Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia constitute a blind spot in security research due to their sensitive nature and the critical security implications arising from it. Border dwellers are particularly affected by aggressive security policies, yet their perspectives are often missing in larger security debates. This dissertation addresses this gap by examining everyday security narratives and practices of borderland communities on the Tunisian and Moroccan sides of the respective regions. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including 96 in-depth interviews across the Oriental region in Morocco and the Gafsa, Kasserine, Kef, and Jendouba regions in Tunisia, it sheds light on how borderland communities navigate everyday security within the distinctive socio-political and geographical contexts of their environments. Notwithstanding their marginalization, borderlands are also reservoirs of powerful resources for their inhabitants. Influenced by both their proximity to an international border and their peripheral status within national frameworks, these liminal zones face communities with unique challenges, but also with opportunities that shape local everyday security practices and discourses. Accordingly, this thesis combines emerging literature on everyday security with borderland studies to develop an integrated security-from-borderlands framework centered on the perspective of their residents. By doing so, it positions borderlands as critical sites of inquiry that offer valuable insights into broader debates on security and state borders. This study finds that for border dwellers, a ‘secure life’ is closely tied to border permeability and the opportunities it provides. Fortification efforts in the name of national security increase feelings of isolation and uncertainty, restrict everyday mobility and arbitrarily fragment social life. However, border populations actively demonstrate resilience as they navigate, adapt to and resist state-driven border conceptions and practices through community care, self-organization and the development of alternative senses of belonging. By bridging borderland studies and critical security studies—two hitherto largely disconnected fields—this dissertation opens new pathways for re-conceptualizing borderlands not merely as insecure spaces at state margins but as dynamic spaces where security is constantly negotiated and redefined.