The Game of Thrones on Europe’s Southern Shore: Securitisation, Engineered Migration, and the Divide-and-Rule of the EU
As Africans, we can smell divide-and-rule the way we smell the first rain — and the crisis now breaking at Ceuta carries that scent. This is a strategic reading: of how migration became ammunition, how a border on African soil became a lever against European unity, and why a continent that has seen this game before must name the players, not blame the pawns. Colonialism did not end. It got smart.
A Crisis That Arrives Too Neatly to Be Only a Crisis
A video circulates: trucks, it is said, offloading hundreds of young men near the Moroccan side of the Ceuta frontier. This journal cannot verify that clip’s origin or backing, and we will not pretend otherwise — but we can say what the strategically literate mind is entitled to notice. Crowds of that size, at a fortified border, at a chosen moment, do not usually assemble themselves. Whether or not this particular footage is what it appears, the pattern it evokes is real, documented, and has a name in European policy itself: the instrumentalisation of migration.
So this is not a piece about whether migrants are good or bad, welcome or not. It is a piece about strategy — about how human beings in desperate motion have been turned into a weapon in a contest between powers, and how a small city on the African continent has become a pressure point in a game whose real prize is not Ceuta at all. It is the unity of the European Union. And as Africans who have watched empires set our own houses against each other for centuries, we recognise the choreography. We are not the audience for this play. We have been the stage. This time, we intend to read the script.
Securitisation is the art of turning a manageable problem into an “emergency” by the way you talk about it. Scholars of the Copenhagen School — Buzan, Wæver, de Wilde — showed that security is not simply a fact but a move: a leader declares something an existential threat, the public accepts the framing, and suddenly extraordinary measures that would normally be illegal or unthinkable become acceptable.
Say “migration crisis” often enough, and a policy challenge becomes a war. Once migration is a “war,” you may build walls, suspend asylum, push people back into the sea, and pay foreign strongmen to hold the line — all cheered as defence. The word does the work the weapon later finishes. That is the machine this piece takes apart.
The Self-Feeding Cycle of Manufactured Threat
The genius of securitisation is that it feeds itself. Each turn of the wheel produces the evidence that justifies the next. Understand this loop and you understand why the “crisis” never resolves — because resolution was never the point.
Didier Bigo of the Paris School gave the sharpest name to the con: security practices do not merely respond to threats — they manufacture them. Restrictive policy forces migrants onto lethal routes; the lethal routes produce visible tragedy; the tragedy is broadcast as proof that the threat is real; and the “proof” licenses still more restriction. The wall does not stop the crisis. The wall is the crisis’s most reliable producer — and, for the political entrepreneur, its most bankable image.
When Migration Becomes Ammunition
Here the argument leaves theory and enters the documented record — because the EU itself has coined the term for what it fears. Since 2021, “instrumentalisation of migration” has been official European language, defined by the European Commission as a third country deliberately pushing migratory flows at the Union’s borders with the intent to destabilise it. The EU admits the weapon exists. The only question this journal adds is: who is holding it, and who taught them to?
The Questions a Strategic African Is Right to Ask
This journal will not assert what it cannot prove. But naming the questions is itself an act of clarity — and in strategy, the question cui bono, “to whose benefit,” is the oldest and sharpest tool there is. So let us ask, plainly, and let the reader weigh it.
Follow the Benefit
We do not answer these as accusations, because we are not the manufacturers of disinformation and we will not become them. But we insist on the questions — because a people trained to ask cui bono cannot be governed by a spectacle. The pawn on the board did not choose the game. Do not blame the pawns — the desperate young men, the drowning families. Blame the players who moved them, and the players who profit from the moving. Play the player, not the piece.
The Territories Where the Rules Are Suspended First
Why do these dramas play out at Ceuta, Melilla, the Canaries, Mayotte — and not at the Rhine or the Seine? Because these are Europe’s laboratories: legally European, geographically African or adjacent to the Global South, and therefore the places where Europe tests how far it can bend its own laws before the mainland notices. What is normalised here today arrives on the mainland tomorrow.
| The exception, tested first | What was documented |
|---|---|
| Pushbacks legalised | In N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, the ECtHR’s Grand Chamber (2020) reversed its own 2017 finding, ruling Spain’s summary returns at Melilla did not breach the Convention — creating a loophole for collective expulsion at militarised borders. Spain’s Constitutional Court blessed a “special regime” for Ceuta and Melilla. |
| Deaths without justice | At the Melilla fence on 24 June 2022, at least 23 died (NGOs say up to 37; ~70 remain missing). Both Spain and Morocco closed investigations citing “no evidence of wrongdoing.” The deadliest recent incident at a European border — and no one is accountable. |
| Two-tier citizenship | In Mayotte, France’s parliament moved in 2025 to restrict birthright citizenship for children born there alone — a territorial exception to a fundamental republican right. Geography now determines the thickness of your rights. |
| Deportation by operation | France’s 2023 Wuambushu operation and successors expelled tens of thousands from Mayotte; over 20,000 Comorians deported in 2025. Security-first management of a crisis rooted in poverty next door. |
| The lethal deterrent | The 2026 Ceuta surge has already seen at least 43 deaths reported; 21 bodies were recovered around Ceuta earlier in 2025. Each fortification simply relocates the dying to a more dangerous route. |
Read the table as a warning, not a lament. Every one of these exceptions was rehearsed at the edge before it was contemplated at the centre. A Europe that accepts suspended rights in Ceuta and Mayotte is a Europe being trained, territory by territory, to accept them everywhere. That is how the frog is boiled: not at the Rhine, but at the Ceuta fence, where the mainland is not looking. The laboratory’s findings always ship to the factory.
The Prize Is Not Ceuta. It Is European Unity
Now assemble the pieces, and the strategy reveals itself. The migration weapon does not aim to conquer territory. It aims to fracture cohesion — to make Europeans distrust each other, resent the frontline states, romanticise the fortress, and tear at the seams that bind the Union. Consider what it has already achieved.
This is the divide-and-rule that Africa knows in its bones, dressed in twenty-first-century clothing. You do not need to invade a strong house if you can convince its occupants to burn it down themselves. The engineered crisis is the match; the algorithmic amplification is the wind; the political entrepreneurs are the ones fanning it for their own small profit, unaware — or unbothered — that they serve a larger design. If it smells like a cold war, it probably is one. And the front line runs through a border on African soil.
Unite, or Be Ruled Fighting Each Other
If the strategy is divide-and-rule, the counter-strategy writes itself, and it is not complicated. It is discipline. Europe is incomparably more powerful together than apart, and the single most self-defeating thing it could do in this moment is fracture. Here is what clear eyes would counsel.
How a United Europe Nips This in the Bud
- Name the game as strategy, not just “migration.” Treat instrumentalised flows as what the EU already admits they are — a hybrid security threat — and let the European Security architecture, not the tabloid, define the response.
- Stand with the frontline state, whoever it is. When Spain is pressured at Ceuta, an attack on one border is an attack on the Union. Solidarity is not charity; it is self-defence. Defend Madrid regardless of whether every capital agrees on every foreign war.
- Desecuritise — return migration to normal politics. Manage it through labour policy, legal pathways, and development cooperation, starving the crisis-machine of the tragedies it feeds on. Wæver’s old prescription is the exit from the loop.
- Refuse the blackmail. Migrants have been made ammunition in a game of leverage. A union that funds legal routes and shared processing removes the ammunition from the gun — and denies the strongman his bargaining chip.
- Starve the amplifiers. Recognise algorithmic amplification and political-entrepreneur panic as force multipliers of the attack, and build the media literacy — in citizens and institutions — that this platform has argued for throughout its Conflict Prevention work.
If Europe Beat Hitler, It Can Beat This
Let me speak now as an African who loves this continent and wishes Europe no harm — only clarity, because our fates are joined across a narrow sea. What is happening on the southern shore is not, at root, about migrants at all. It is about power, and about the oldest strategy power knows: divide, and then rule the pieces. We Africans are experts in this dance, because we were its longest-suffering partners. Our borders were drawn to split us; our chiefs were turned against each other; our unity was the one thing the empire could not permit. So forgive us if we recognise the smell of this rain before the first drop falls.
And here is what I most want to say to Europe, plainly: do not fall for it. The most foolish thing a strong house can do, when a rival wants it weak, is to start fighting in its own rooms. You are more powerful together than any of you are apart — and every quarrel over quotas, every fence built against a neighbour, every frontline state left to bleed alone, is a gift to whoever authored this design. If you could unite to defeat Hitler, you can unite to defeat a divide-and-rule dressed as a border crisis. This too can be beaten — but only together, and only by those clear-headed enough to see the board, not just the piece screaming in the foreground.
I will even offer the provocation my honest ledger permits, as a strategist and not a partisan: perhaps the first move of this game was played not at Ceuta but at Dover — that the fracturing of Britain from the Union was the opening gambit of the same divide-and-rule, and that a Britain now battered by the very migration pressures it was promised leaving would solve might, one day, begin the serious conversation about rejoining the house it was tricked into leaving. I say it not to reopen old wounds but to name a pattern: the game is always to separate, and the counter is always to reunite. Play the player, not the pawn.
For Africa, the lesson is our own to keep. We cannot afford to be the stage for another cold war, nor the ammunition dump for another power’s quarrel. Morocco is our brother, Western Sahara our unfinished business, and the Mediterranean our shared frontier — and none of these should be allowed to become the fuse for a conflict lit by others and paid for by us. Ziva kwawakabva; ziva anokutamba — know where you came from, and know who is playing you. We have read this script before. This time, we are not the audience, and we are not the pawns. We are the ones naming the game. Tigashire.
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