In summer 2023, I spent a few months in the south of Tunisia, mainly in Zarzis, where my family resides. Zarzis is a coastal fishing town situated immediately south of the island of Djerba and about thirty-seven miles from Tunisia’s border with Libya, which has become a hub for migration of both Tunisians and other Africans and non-Africans to Europe. In the last decades, Tunisia has gone through a politically tumultuous time, with, first, the neoliberal economic politics of the Ben Ali era (1987–2011), then the 2010–2011 revolution that led to a procedural democracy uncritically adopting the global war on terror’s securitization and international financial institutions’ austerity policies, and, since 2021, the chaotic power grab and democratic reversal of President Kais Saied. All this is on the back of an underlying regime of systematic inequality between coastal elites and marginalized inland and southern regions, inhabitants of the latter functioning as a marginalized domestic “Other.” These conditions intersect in the town of Zarzis and have led to much contention.

Zarzis presents an important yet under-researched case study. While its local dynamics are frequently publicized, they lack comprehensive academic investigation. A main motivator that led me to conduct extensive ethnographic research that culminated in the creation of the documentary En Route to Europe, We Burn or Die was the shipwreck of a small fishing boat in September 2022, carrying eighteen Tunisians (all of them from Zarzis) to the Italian island of Lampedusa as their intended destination. Strangely, local authorities spread false stories that the boat and those drowned were held captive by an armed militia in Libya to hide their incompetence, until local fishermen found eight bodies between September 26 and October 10, and it came to light that those local authorities had already secretly buried several others in unmarked graves while maintaining their militia story. Weeks of intense protest and repression followed, but media coverage soon dissipated. En Route to Europe centers not the migration, but those migrating—Africans, both Tunisians and other nationals—and seeks to investigate personal stories of migration and connect them to social and economic marginalization in the Tunisian south, as well as to EU border externalization policy.

Driven by its close partnership with the European Union, in recent years the Tunisian government has tightened security to curb migration. This externalization of EU borders has subjected both Tunisian and African migrants to strict surveillance and mobility controls by Tunisian border security apparatuses. Many migrants attempting to reach Europe by sea lose their lives as a direct result of these aggressive securitization measures. A key part of this effort is the July 2023 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) through which Tunisia received financial aid to tighten border security and halt migrant crossings to Europe. The deal came amid a wave of state-led anti-migrant stigmatization. President Saied’s 2023 statement fueled this tension by claiming a conspiracy existed since 2011 to flood the country with sub-Saharan migrants, alter its demographics, and erase its Arab-Islamic heritage. This rhetoric closely mirrored Western far-right ideologies, earning swift praise from Éric Zemmour, a prominent French proponent of the “Great Replacement” theory. Against this backdrop of heightened tension—marked by racist violence and local vigilantism between residents and migrants in Sfax following the murder of a Tunisian citizen—I returned to Zarzis in the summer of 2024 to conduct further fieldwork.

Upon arrival, I reached out to an old acquaintance who has an olive orchard and relies on local labor from Zarzis, and more recently on African migrants, in helping him pruning, weeding, and harvesting olives. He informed me that he had a Sudanese citizen, originally from Darfur, who a few weeks prior had started working as a seasonal laborer on his olive farm in the fishing village of Jdariya, in southeastern Tunisia, twenty-two miles south of Zarzis and close to the maritime border with Libya. Jdariya is also where the UNHCR provides provisional shelter for refugees and asylum seekers. He agreed to talk to him and asked if he was willing to sit with me and share some of the details about his journey that led him to Tunisia. A week later, I got a call from my longtime friend who informed me that Abdou was interested in meeting me.

On July 17, 2024, in mid-afternoon, I drove to my friend’s olive grove in Jdariya, where I met Abdou. Abdou informed me that he was living in Jdariya’s UNHCR shelter that hosted approximately 500 refugees and asylum seekers, most of them from Sudan; this number has decreased substantially since then. During my first meeting with Abdou, which lasted for almost three hours, I listened to him in order to understand what motivated his journey and to learn about his experiences while taking notes. I brought a map of the Sahara–Sahel–Mediterranean trans-region to my second meeting to identify the countries and locations that he had crossed during his journey to Tunisia. I went to my third meeting with the idea to further inquire about his journey, and I talked to him about En Route to Europe. He then asked me if I could video-record our conversation detailing his own dangerous migratory experience. Since I did not have high-quality equipment to record on video, I suggested using my phone to record ten minutes of him discussing some of the salient moments of his journey across the trans-region.

The ten minutes turned into a thirty-minute interview in which Abdou narrated his history and struggles. He stressed the violence he endured and witnessed, fears and hopes, opportunities and misfortunes. The recording happened in an open area on the olive field over the roar of a tractor that a farmer was driving close by. When asked about sharing and publishing his story, he explained that the West must recognize a critical truth: Becoming a refugee or migrant is never a voluntary choice. He emphasized that displacement is, instead, directly driven by structural exploitation within African nations, actively enabled and supported by Western powers. Acts of systemic dispossession, like land grabbing or damaging artisanal fishing industries and IMF’s structural adjustment policies, have dispossessed local communities of their livelihoods. These processes have forced people like Abdou to leave their homes, making their migration a structural necessity rather than a voluntary decision for a better life. While the global capitalist system exploits migrants for their cheap labor, European markets simultaneously restrict them through strict territorial control and racialized exclusion, denying them access to the wealth they help create.

In May 2021, Abdou was forced to leave Darfur, almost two years before the violent eruption of war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, which plunged Sudan into a humanitarian calamity. One of the reasons motivating Abdou’s involuntary departure from his homeland was a struggle over pastoral land, water, and access to scarce economic resources that fueled the conflict in Darfur. Since 2003, the conflict escalated into mass violence, killings, atrocities, destruction, scorched-earth campaigns, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed by the Sudanese state under the former President Omar al-Bashir, whose government employed local auxiliary-funded militias, mainly the Janjaweed (i.e., “men with guns on horses or camels”) against specific ethnic tribal groups, including Abdou’s Masalit, who rebelled against the region’s unequal distribution of resources. In 2018, Abdou’s father died after being assaulted and beaten by the RSF, which seized the family’s ancestral land to which they are intimately connected.

Instead of intervening with specific questions, I allowed Abdou to share his story in his own way, avoiding any interruptions or attempts to force the narrative into a structured or semi-structured interview format. Listening to Abdou’s details about his journey helped me to understand the agency of those who have been struggling, in the midst of the agony of oppression, for dignity and basic rights while fighting both against their commodification into cheap labor and their being beaten into submission, and sometimes death, by design.

Although it may not be legally sanctioned to kill illegalized migrants, everywhere in the world, discourses in the media and by government officials subject migrants to the denial of basic rights, including physical support, safe living conditions, and resources to stabilize after displacement. Abdou explained how crossing borders was the most profoundly perilous physical challenge in his whole journey. Borders worldwide are heavily militarized, from the U.S.–Mexico border to Southern Europe and the Sahara–Sahel–Mediterranean trans-region: This intense fortification allows the transnational capitalist class to insulate themselves from the human consequences of their greed. Ultimately, these deadly border controls protect a ruthless, unequal capitalist system that enriches a privileged few while forcing vast swaths of humanity to suffer. To safeguard its economic success, Western-led capitalism will likely continue building borders, intercepting migrants, and shooting on migrants’ boats. This engineered “death by design” deliberately forces people to endure lethal thirst in places such as Arizona deserts and the Sahara, and turns the Mediterranean Sea into a massive refugee graveyard, as a form of what the U.S. Border Patrol Strategic Plan of 1994 called “prevention through deterrence”—which mirrors the aggressive tactics used by coercive security regimes against migrants throughout the Global South. Like many people, Abdou’s painful migratory experience reflects the global plight of modern refugees and migrants. This movement is deeply tied to the colonial and neocolonial systems that Frantz Fanon critiqued in The Wretched of the Earth, which forcefully displace individuals both physically and psychically. Fanon connected this transnational migration directly to global inequality, emphasizing “the need for a redistribution of wealth” and already warned, in 1961, “Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be” (55).

In the summer of 2026, I went back to Zarzis with the hope of reconnecting with Abdou again, but he was nowhere to be found. My old friend told me that he had left his farm a few weeks after I had met him, as he was looking for a more permanent job. Then, I reached out to Sudanese individuals at the UNHCR provisional shelter in Jdariya and showed them his photo, but no one recognized him. They pointed out that most current residents of the provisional shelter are newcomers, and that the total number of tenants has dropped to about fifty. Hundreds of others have left, returning either to Sudan or Libya. Many of them believe that crossing to Europe from Libya is less challenging than from Tunisia, where maritime routes are heavily restricted due to increased Tunisian coast guard patrols, EU-funded border security arrangements, and strict Italian anti-migration policies. Additionally, it can be argued that Abdou and others might have been forced to seek alternative routes due to the UNHCR suspending its renewal of one-year ID cards. This policy, enacted by Tunisian authorities in compliance with the EU’s externalization regime, effectively stranded thousands in legal limbo without documentation or access to critical humanitarian assistance.

During our first off-camera meeting, I had asked Abdou if he had intended to reach Europe when he left Sudan. He replied that it was never his original plan. Instead, the idea only began to take shape after he arrived in Morocco—well before he was violently assaulted and injured by Moroccan security forces in the outskirts of Melilla on June 24, 2022. Still, the most painful story that Abdou conveyed to me in detail, with an emotional tone, is the murder of his sisters by the RSF. Voicing such a deeply personal, traumatic loss is undoubtedly profoundly difficult for someone like Abdou, who did not have access to resources managing trauma and emotional distress. My hope is that Abdou is alive and well wherever he is now, and that this interview brings some justice for all the struggles and unfairness he endured.