As of 2022, Morocco achieved a crime index of ***** points. The index measures the level of crime in a given country or city. Crime in Morocco was considered as being on a moderate level in 2022. In the period under review, the index peaked in 2016 at ***** points.

In 2022, Casablanca, the largest city in Morocco, registered a crime index of 55.59 points. This meant that, at the said date, crime in the city was on a moderate level. Compared to 2016, when the level of crime in the country peaked, it decreased by approximately eight percent. Overall, at the national level, Morocco achieved a crime index score of 49.1 points.

Eight out of every 10 women in Morocco has been already subjected to at least one act of violence in their life. In the 12 months preceding the survey done in 2019, ** percent of females aged 15 to 74 years were victims of violence in the country. Furthermore, women between the ages of 15 and 19 years were the most affected (** percent), followed by those aged 25 to 29 years (** percent). Overall, single and divorced women constitute the most vulnerable social group compared to widows and married women.

This ethnographic project aims to examine criminalizing and illegalizing processes targeting pro-migration activists and other citizens (e.g. volunteers, practitioners) in Morocco and France. The study investigates the competing ways in which ‘crimes of solidarity’ mobilise discourses and practices of solidarity, citizenship, and illegality in Morocco and France. The data collection examines how state repression of pro-migration activists and other ‘citizens’, who are often conflated with smugglers and accused of aiding irregular migrants, sheds light on the shifting and contested legal, moral and political boundaries between ‘irregular migrants’ and ‘citizens’. The recent focus on the figure and experience of ‘the migrant’ has enriched scholarly engagements with the construction of migrant illegality, irregular migrant political agency, and the entanglements of humanitarianism and security. Our project expands these conversations by exploring how migration politics target and affect not just migrants but also citizens. This shift is necessary in order to examine the far-reaching bordering practices and contested politics of exclusion beyond inter-state boundaries and the precarious lives of irregular migrants. We investigate how migration politics in France and Morocco are shifting the political agency and subjectivity of citizens who face (the threat of) prosecution from state authorities at the border and beyond.

This has been achieved through participant observation and informal interviews with activists, artists, community leaders, NGO practitioners, funders, and other relevant professionals in Morocco and France. Themes discussed during conversations included : participants’ opinions about the politics of migration in Morocco/France; their history of activism and other engagement around migration; the motivations behind their engagement; the difficulties and obstacles they have faced in their activities and engagement over migration etc.

The project has generated original insights into how hostile migration politics that selectively manage, stop, deter, and control forms of mobility also target individuals and organisations providing forms of support, assistance, aid to migrant people. The project has shed light on how state authorities in France and Morocco deploy indirect, opaque, and insidious forms of harassment to intimidate ‘subversive solidarity actors’: citizens engaging in acts of solidarity with migrant people who publicly or covertly engage in a critical stance on migration control policies and practices. This research emphasises the importance of taking the policing of solidarity actors into account to understand the policing of migration more broadly, detailing how the racist and gendered policing of migrant people bleeds into the disciplining of those who support them.

While attention to citizen solidarity has focused on European countries, the phenomenon is also visible in countries south of the Mediterranean. Spectacular trials have made the headlines. Our research findings shed light on the workings of less spectacular modes of criminalisation that target solidarity workers in the intimacy of their everyday lives, threatening their sense of security through opaque surveillance, attacks on their emotions, employment prospects and family life. We conceptualise this mode of criminalisation as ‘insidious harassment’, examining the entanglement of geopolitics, emotions, and the intimate at these migration pressure points. Without decentring migrants as the primary targets of violent bordering, it broadens our understanding of these regimes by drawing attention to the ways in which they viscerally target those who work to protect the rights of migrant people. The project’s findings highlight how forms of criminalisation range widely, from the explicit and physical to the intimate and psychological; from the formal to the informal, the banal to the spectacular.

The findings reveal that states invest considerable resources - money, human resources (official & unofficial) and time - in seeking to inflict a sense of constant surveillance and discomfort on solidarity actors. Many of the people we spoke to suspected that these indirect and opaque forms of state violence represent a way to protect the appearance and reputation of these states as rights-respecting, while in fact they pursue a dedicated campaign of trying to harass migrant people and those who support them into submission. The effects of insidious harassment are multiple: they are financial, administrative, emotional, psychological, physical and sometimes legal. Beyond just impacting practices of solidarity, they work to target solidarity actors on a moral and on practical levels, with repercussions on their work, family and social lives. This constitutes a protracted and everyday pressure that often works to disrupt solidarity actors’ sense of safety within and trust of the authorities and nation state. However, achieving an overview and in-depth understanding of these modes of policing and how they play out may contribute to reducing these effects. This research project has also shed light on how in contexts where repression is constantly squeezed and solidarity actors face damaging state practices, their commitment to rectifying social injustices and wrongs is also galvanised.

This ethnographic project aims to examine criminalizing and illegalizing processes targeting pro-migration activists and other citizens (e.g. volunteers, practitioners) in Morocco and France. The study investigates the competing ways in which ‘crimes of solidarity’ mobilise discourses and practices of solidarity, citizenship, and illegality in Morocco and France. The data collection examines how state repression of pro-migration activists and other ‘citizens’, who are often conflated with smugglers and accused of aiding irregular migrants, sheds light on the shifting and contested legal, moral and political boundaries between ‘irregular migrants’ and ‘citizens’. The recent focus on the figure and experience of ‘the migrant’ has enriched scholarly engagements with the construction of migrant illegality, irregular migrant political agency, and the entanglements of humanitarianism and security. Our project expands these conversations by exploring how migration politics target and affect not just migrants but also citizens. This shift is necessary in order to examine the far-reaching bordering practices and contested politics of exclusion beyond inter-state boundaries and the precarious lives of irregular migrants. We investigate how migration politics in France and Morocco are shifting the political agency and subjectivity of citizens who face (the threat of) prosecution from state authorities at the border and beyond. This has been achieved through participant observation and informal interviews with activists, artists, community leaders, NGO practitioners, funders, and other relevant professionals in Morocco and France. Themes discussed during conversations included : participants’ opinions about the politics of migration in Morocco/France; their history of activism and other engagement around migration; the motivations behind their engagement; the difficulties and obstacles they have faced in their activities and engagement over migration etc. The project has generated original insights into how hostile migration politics that selectively manage, stop, deter, and control forms of mobility also target individuals and organisations providing forms of support, assistance, aid to migrant people. The project has shed light on how state authorities in France and Morocco deploy indirect, opaque, and insidious forms of harassment to intimidate ‘subversive solidarity actors’: citizens engaging in acts of solidarity with migrant people who publicly or covertly engage in a critical stance on migration control policies and practices. This research emphasises the importance of taking the policing of solidarity actors into account to understand the policing of migration more broadly, detailing how the racist and gendered policing of migrant people bleeds into the disciplining of those who support them. While attention to citizen solidarity has focused on European countries, the phenomenon is also visible in countries south of the Mediterranean. Spectacular trials have made the headlines. Our research findings shed light on the workings of less spectacular modes of criminalisation that target solidarity workers in the intimacy of their everyday lives, threatening their sense of security through opaque surveillance, attacks on their emotions, employment prospects and family life. We conceptualise this mode of criminalisation as ‘insidious harassment’, examining the entanglement of geopolitics, emotions, and the intimate at these migration pressure points. Without decentring migrants as the primary targets of violent bordering, it broadens our understanding of these regimes by drawing attention to the ways in which they viscerally target those who work to protect the rights of migrant people. The project’s findings highlight how forms of criminalisation range widely, from the explicit and physical to the intimate and psychological; from the formal to the informal, the banal to the spectacular. The findings reveal that states invest considerable resources - money, human resources (official & unofficial) and time - in seeking to inflict a sense of constant surveillance and discomfort on solidarity actors. Many of the people we spoke to suspected that these indirect and opaque forms of state violence represent a way to protect the appearance and reputation of these states as rights-respecting, while in fact they pursue a dedicated campaign of trying to harass migrant people and those who support them into submission. The effects of insidious harassment are multiple: they are financial, administrative, emotional, psychological, physical and sometimes legal. Beyond just impacting practices of solidarity, they work to target solidarity actors on a moral and on practical levels, with repercussions on their work, family and social lives. This constitutes a protracted and everyday pressure that often works to disrupt solidarity actors’ sense of safety within and trust of the authorities and nation state. However, achieving an overview and in-depth understanding of these modes of policing and how they play out may contribute to reducing these effects. This research project has also shed light on how in contexts where repression is constantly squeezed and solidarity actors face damaging state practices, their commitment to rectifying social injustices and wrongs is also galvanised.As irregular migration into Europe remains at the centre of heated political debates, 'citizens' (including charity workers, activists, volunteers etc.) who provide help to 'irregular migrants' increasingly face intimidation, repression and prosecution from state authorities. There has been a rise in high-profile cases such as French farmer Herrou sentenced to prison for facilitating irregular entry at the French-Italian border, and Spanish activist Helena Maleno, accused by both Spain and Morocco of smuggling migrants. The activities for which individuals (and organizations) can be prosecuted are diverse and whether such activities are criminal is often contested: giving a lift to migrants, providing food or shelter, preventing a plane used for deportation from taking off, helping migrants to cross borders without documents, rescuing people at sea etc. Activists have coined the term 'crimes of solidarity', arguing that repressive legislations have been deployed not only to sanction criminals (e.g. 'smugglers') who benefit financially, but also to potentially sanction anyone providing help and relief to migrants, in defiance of international norms of human rights. This study explores these illegalisation and criminalisation processes amongst volunteers, activists, practitioners and other citizens in Morocco and France, where Civil Society Organisations have denounced state repression against migrants trying to cross the sea to continue their journeys and those providing assistance to them. It brings to the fore the shifting boundaries between 'citizens' and 'irregular migrants' and debates over solidarity and illegality. Whilst scholars have increasingly paid attention to the production of illegality amongst migrants, there has been little work on how such processes also affect the political agency and subjectivity of citizens. The study will address this gap by generating qualitative data on how citizens are subjected to and navigate illegalisation and criminalisation processes. It examines these processes in a European country (France) and one of its partners in the Global South (Morocco) for the 'management of migration'. This comparative approach enables to further highlight how hostile migration politics are entangled with a range of connections across Africa and Europe and competing discourses over values such as solidarity. To address the methodological and ethical issues which emerge from researching such politically contentious matters, this ethnographic study will combine participant-observation and interviews with visual methods to generate outputs with transformative power. Co-designed and co-delivered with civil society partners to ensure cross-sector relevance, the project includes two Knowledge Exchange and Impact events (in France and in Morocco) to bring together practitioners, activists, researchers, artists and policy-makers. These events will foster wider cross-sector collaborations through the sharing of best practice and solutions to the criminalisation of solidarity towards migrants. The KEI events will include the launch of country-specific policy briefs about: the legal framework and risks faced by activists; testimonials and evidence-based policy recommendations on practices and policies. The policy briefs will be aimed to relevant state bodies and decision-makers and other research users in France, Morocco and beyond. The project will also entail one international workshop in Manchester with delegates from across and beyond academia to share findings and responses to the criminalisation of acts of solidarity towards irregular migrants in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Creative outputs (e.g. photographs, videos) generated through the use of visual methods will result in a touring exhibition organised with a curator to increase awareness and understanding of migration issues and criminalisation processes amongst the general public in Morocco, France and beyond.

Context

This Dataset is a time-varying criminal network that is repeatedly disturbed by police forces. The CAVIAR investigation lasted two years and ran from 1994 to 1996. The operation brought together investigation units of the Montréal police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of Canada. During this two-year period, 11 wiretap warrants, valid for a period of about two months each, were obtained (the 11 matrices contained in phase1.csv, phase2.csv, correspond to these eleven, two-month wiretap phases).

Content

This case is interesting because, unlike other investigative strategies, the mandate of the CAVIAR project was to seize the drugs without arresting the perpetrators. During this period, imports of the trafficking network were hit by the police on eleven occasions. The arrests took place only at the end of the investigation. Monetary losses for traffickers were estimated at 32 million dollars. Eleven seizures took place throughout the investigation. Some phases included no seizures, and others included multiple.

The following summarizes the seizures:

Phase 4 1 seizure $2,500,000 300 kg of marijuana Phase 6 3 seizures $1,300,000 2 x 15 kg of marijuana + 1 x 2 kg of cocaine Phase 7 1 seizure $3,500,000 401 kg of marijuana Phase 8 1 seizure $360,000 9 kg of cocaine Phase 9 2 seizures $4,300,000 2 kg of cocaine + 1 x 500 kg marijuana Phase 10 1 seizure $18,700,000 2200 kg of marijuana Phase 11 2 seizures $1,300,000 12 kg of cocaine + 11 kg of cocaine

This case offers a rare opportunity to study a criminal network in upheaval from police forces. This allows us to analyze changes in the network structure and to survey the reaction and adaptation of the participants while they were subjected to an increasing number of distressing constraints.

The network consists of 110 (numbered) players. Players 1-82 are the traffickers. Players 83-110 are the non-traffickers (financial investors; accountants; owners of various importation businesses, etc.). Initially, the investigation targeted Daniel Serero, the alleged mastermind of a drug network in downtown Montréal, who attempted to import marijuana to Canada from Morocco, transiting through Spain. After the first seizure, happening in Phase 4, traffickers reoriented to cocaine import from Colombia, transiting through the United States.

According to the police, the role of 23 of the players in the “Serero organization" are the following, listed by name (unique id):

Daniel Serero (n1) : Mastermind of the network.

Pierre Perlini (n3) : Principal lieutenant of Serero, he executes Serero's instructions.

Alain (n83) and Gérard (n86) Levy : Investors and transporters of money.

Wallace Lee (n85) : Takes care of financial affairs (accountant).

Gaspard Lino (n6): Broker in Spain.

Samir Rabbat (n11): Provider in Morocco.

Lee Gilbert (n88): A trusted man of Wallace Lee (became an informer after the arrest).

Beverly Ashton (n106): Spouse of Lino, transports money and documents.

Antonio Iannacci (n89): Investor.

Mohammed Echouafni (n84): Moroccan investor.

Richard Gleeson (n5), Bruno de Quinzio (n8) and Gabrielle Casale (n76) : Charged with recuperating the marijuana.

Roderik Janouska (n77): Individual with airport contacts.

Patrick Lee (n87): Investor.

Salvatore Panetta (n82): Transport arrangements manager.

Steve Cunha (n96): Transport manager, owner of a legitimate import company (became an informer after the arrest).

Ernesto Morales (n12): Principal organizer of the cocaine import, an intermediary between the Colombians and the Serero organization.

Oscar Nieri (n17): The handyman of Morales.

Richard Brebner (n80): Was transporting the cocaine from the US to Montréal.

Ricardo Negrinotti (n33): Was taking possession of the cocaine in the US to hand it to Brebner.

Johnny Pacheco (n16): Cocaine provider.

In the data files (phase1.csv, phase2.csv, ), you will find matrices that report the number of wiretapped correspondences between the above players in the network, where players are identified by their unique id. You will be analyzing this time-varying network, giving a rough sketch of its shape, its evolution and the role of the actors in it.

You can also load this dataset directly from the internet (which is slightly more convenient when using Colab) using the following Python code:

import pandas as pd import networkx as nx phases = {} G = {} for i in range(1,12): var_name = "phase" + str(i) file_name = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ragini30/Networks-Homework/main/" + var_name + ".csv" phases[i] = pd.read_csv(file_name, index_col = ["players"]...

TIAS 12029 cover memo. Visit https://dataone.org/datasets/sha256%3A9be8fe4b410cccbd2ffb7c37cdcf1afed4d922fb1cef725f754c59ee0665b994 for complete metadata about this dataset.

Political stability in North Africa remains a significant challenge, with all countries in the region recording negative index values in the political stability and absence of violence/terrorism index. As of 2023, Sudan recorded the lowest stability score in the region at -2.47. The country has seen a sharp and sustained decline in stability since 2020. This was in the aftermath of the 2019 protests, which led to the ousting of President Omar al-Bashir. The political situation worsened further in April 2023 as a result of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), triggering widespread displacement and insecurity. Corruption, repression, and media control A lack of political freedoms and press freedom plays a significant role in shaping perceptions of instability. According to the World Press Freedom Index in 2024, countries like Egypt and Algeria fall into the categories of a “very serious” or “difficult” situation for media freedom, scoring 25.1 and 41.98 out of 100, respectively. Even relatively higher scorers such as Tunisia and Morocco remain in the “difficult” range. Limited press freedom and government control over information reduce transparency and restrict public oversight. This environment facilitates systemic corruption, as independent media are unable to investigate or report on abuses of power. Repressive state measures, including censorship and legal threats against journalists, further undermine institutional checks and balances. Combined with weak governance and the influence of organized crime, these dynamics contribute to persistent political instability across the region. Organized criminal networks The consequences of restricted transparency are reflected in high levels of perceived corruption and deeply embedded criminal networks. According to the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, Libya scored just 13 out of 100, while Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia all scored below 40, indicating high public concern about government corruption. These concerns align with findings from the ENACT Organized Crime Index, which highlights the dominance of state-embedded actors and criminal networks in the region. With scores of 7.67 and 5.67 respectively, the data suggests that criminal activities are often closely tied to political and institutional power structures. This interconnection between corrupt governance and organized crime further erodes public trust and reinforces the perception, and reality, of chronic instability across North Africa.

The average for 2017 based on 65 countries was 1.8 kidnappings per 100,000 people. The highest value was in Belgium: 10.3 kidnappings per 100,000 people and the lowest value was in Bermuda: 0 kidnappings per 100,000 people. The indicator is available from 2003 to 2017. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.