Jennie Shin is pleased to welcome Antoni Vives, policy analyst and the former Deputy Mayor of Barcelona. Vives offers a nuanced geopolitical interpretation of the Ceuta migration crisis, arguing that the events cannot be understood solely as a humanitarian emergency or a spontaneous wave of migration. Vives frames the crisis within a broader framework encompassing historical colonial legacies, demographic and economic inequalities, regional power competition between Morocco and Algeria, and the strategic use of migration as an instrument of statecraft. While acknowledging the aspirations of young Moroccans seeking economic opportunity, he contends that the scale and timing of the crossings reflect deliberate geopolitical signalling by Morocco toward Spain.
