ABSTRACT
As one of the only two land borders of the European Union (EU) in Africa, the Spanish autonomous city of Melilla has been one of the main entry points of irregular migration flows that seek to reach Europe since the 1990s. At the same time, this Spanish enclave has been used as a laboratory for testing the securitization and externalization of borders, which has been characteristic of the Spanish and EU migration policies of the past decades. Citizen movements have emerged in the city as a reaction to these border regimes and to the perceived failure of the political authorities to comply with or even recognize their legal and their moral responsibilities. They aim to address the needs of migrants and refugees that are left unprotected by the lack of political will and to fill the gaps that professionalized humanitarian organizations cannot or do not cover. At the same time, these initiatives serve as a form of protest to denounce the governmental neglect and abandonment and contest the imposed security mandates to control human movement (for similar citizen movements in Greece, see e.g. Mitchell and Sparke 2020; Rozakou 2017).
