The Moroccan diaspora in northern Europe is intimately connected to the history of coal mining. Recruited as expendable labor to close down an industry on its last legs, Moroccan men forged ties of solidarity across ethnic and religious lines, participated in transformative labor politics, and laid the groundwork for a multi-generational community which would survive—in radically transformed fashion—the closure of the mines. This paper explores the emergent infrastructures of employment (including diplomatic accords, legal statutes, recruitment personnel, transportation logistics, medical services, language/cultural training, and housing construction) dialogically assembled by state officials, mining federations, and Moroccan workers, and their unexpected consequences for both recruiters and the recruited. Contrasting the cases of France and Belgium, the paper highlights the implicit ethnographic knowledge brought to bear in the management of the “Moroccan worker” as an object of hope, but also of anxiety and intervention. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in the ruins of these former mining communities, the paper concludes with an examination of how these prior socio-political formations have become an object of nostalgia for both states and younger Moroccans who each see in them a moment of relative intra- and trans-national “integration” in contrast with a present of neo-nationalism and exclusion.

Displaced Syrians in Lebanon face a multitude of legal, social, and political categories that operate together to structure their lives and opportunities. One important site of juxtaposition of these various categories can be found in the area of municipal governance. Most prominent among municipal policy tools has been the bannered discriminatory curfews that line the public squares of many of Lebanon’s urban neighbourhood, towns and villages. The various named “targets” of these curfews — whether foreigners, Syrians, displaced, labourers, brothers, or the disembodied “motorbike” — instantiate the complexity of issues of Syrian belonging in the country. This paper aims to unpack these categories through their historical, political, and social dimensions, and through the lived experience of Syrians who encounter, negotiate, and - at times - resist them. As categories, these “targets” do not operate entirely separate from one another and serve primarily as a form of social ordering – defining the “other” in distinct forms – rather than a legal or political one. Building on over a year of fieldwork in Lebanon from October 2015 to December 2016, this paper relies on a diverse set of sources, including ethnographic observation, documents, and interviews with a wide array of actors including Lebanese citizens and displaced Syrians, mayors and municipal police officers, as well as lawyers, journalists, aid workers, and central government officials.

It is commonly claimed that the adhan, or Muslim call to prayer, is not broadcast from minarets in France because of the French principle of laïcité, which protects public space, schools, and the state, from religion. This conclusion has been stated with such certainty as to make further examination of the adhan in France seem unnecessary or even inflammatory. But this explanation does not provide an understanding of why the Muslim community in France—proportionately the largest in Europe—has not pressed this silencing as an issue of religious freedom as it has in England, the United States, Germany, and Sweden. What role does the adhan, and its effective silencing, play in Muslim diasporic politics of belonging in France, and how, precisely, is the suppression of the adhan as a publicly aired religious sound reconciled with discursive normalization of ringing Christian church bells? We have a limited understanding of how the adhan, as a sound-object, is governed in France and what modalities of power are at play in maintaining a soundscape that corresponds to hegemonic aesthetic norms. This paper addresses these questions, using the adhan and its absence in France to examine embodied dimensions of belonging and citizenship. Understanding silence as a tool of both top-down oppression and bottom-up agency, it argues that silence in France structures citizens’ right to the city, and demonstrates that when it comes to religious sound, the principle of laïcité is applied not in the upkeep of secular space but rather in service of cultural protectionism.

In situations where migratory processes have introduced spatial discontinuities between the country of birth and death, the act of burial serves as a means to assert belonging, attachment, and perhaps even loyalty to a particular group, nation, or place. It confers a sense of fixity to identities that are more fluid and ambivalent in life. This paper examines what happens to migrant bodies after they die. It argues that the governance of the dead is intimately tied to the construction of the nation and the enactment of sovereign power. Through a comparative study of the mortuary practices of Turkish and Kurdish communities in Germany, it highlights the ways that death structures political membership and identity. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin and Istanbul, it shows how the corpse functions as a political object by structuring claims about citizenship and collective identity. By tracing the actors, networks, and institutions that determine the movement of dead bodies within and across international borders, it analyzes how relations between authority, territory, and populations are managed at a transnational level. It demonstrates that in contexts where the boundaries of the nation and its membership are contested, burial decisions are political decisions. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with bereaved families, Muslim undertakers, government officials, religious leaders, and representatives of funeral aid societies, it shows how decisions about where and how to be buried are linked to larger political struggles over the meaning of home and homeland. While burial in Europe offers a symbolically powerful means for migrants and their children to assert political membership and foster a sense of belonging, the widespread practice of posthumous repatriation to countries of origin illustrates the continued importance of transnational ties and serves as an indictment of an exclusionary socio-political order.