La fabrique du migrant à Mayotte

This course examines the political and discursive construction of the “migrant” figure in Mayotte, focusing on how colonial legacies, legal frameworks, and media narratives converge to shape the island’s contemporary socio-political landscape. Through a combination of literary excerpts, demographic reports, institutional discourse, and fieldwork-based analysis, students are invited to critically assess the ways in which migration is problematized and governed in this French overseas department. Special attention is paid to the historical fabrication of borders within the Comorian archipelago—borders that remain contested by international actors but are enforced through increasingly rigid juridical and spatial regimes. The course explores how the implementation of the 1995 Balladur visa, the militarization of the coastline, and the recurrent discourse of “clandestinity” have produced a form of governance that can be interpreted through the lens of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003), where the state exerts power through exposure to death and extreme precarity. In this context, Mayotte emerges as a postcolonial laboratory of exception, where migration is not only managed but symbolically charged with anxieties over sovereignty, identity, and inequality. The presentation examines the 2023 Wuambushu operation and the evolving role of Mahoran women in anti-immigration mobilizations, engaging with the paradoxes of a population that historically fought for integration into the Republic while now expressing exclusionary demands. The analysis of parliamentary discourse, particularly report no. 864 (2025), further reveals how language contributes to the institutionalization of urgency, irregularity, and exception as defining features of Mayotte’s migration regime.

The resource consists of a PDF of the presentation, an MP4 file with commentary on the presentation, and the latest parliamentary report on the reform of jus soli in Mayotte.