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Okay. I think I think we will. We'll begin now.

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It's great to see such a large audience.

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And I'm really pleased to welcome you all to our third one of these little seminars.

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This but one more start. So don't don't forget about the next one.

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But anyway, it's my pleasure today to welcome Dr. Gabrielle Sanchez to talk to us about her research into human smuggling.

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Gabriella is a fellow at the Migration and Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute,

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where she leads the migrant smuggling research agenda. She's as a socio cultural anthropologist with a background in law enforcement.

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Gabrielle His work focuses on the study of irregular migration facilitation and the crimes often associated with it.

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The work which is carried out in all sorts of places, including the Americas, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe,

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is recognised for relying on a community centred human rights approach for the study of mobility,

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which it draws from direct interactions and research contributions from smuggling facilitators,

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and seeks to reduce the research gaps between the experiences of people on the migration pathway and the policy responses that target them.

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Gabriela is the author of a number of different books and articles, including the 2016 book with Routledge, Human Smuggling and Border Crossing,

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and the co-editor of a 2018 special issue on Migrants Smuggling of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.

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She's affiliated with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime and is a co-editor for Border Criminology,

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which, as you know, is based here at the Criminology Sense, the criminology.

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And currently she's part of a U.S. Mexico border based initiative on young people's roles in the facilitation of migrant journeys.

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She conducts fieldwork as part of an EU funded project on human smuggling in Libya and Tunisia and

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is working on a new book project on the emergence of smuggling as a global policing practice.

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So welcome, Gabriela. Thank you so much. And can you hear me or do I need to bring the microphone?

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I'm not even sure it's on. Oh, no, but it looks it looks good anywhere.

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It's relaxed. So thank you so much to all of you for being here.

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I as soon as I came in, you know, I know that we got here a little bit early, but it's been really,

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really exciting and really interesting to see that there is so much interest about this topic, you know,

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topic of facilitation, and especially on the fact that we are looking at it or that the work that we have been carrying out,

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that the NPC has a different approach to what we tend to to commonly hear about.

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But let me start singing by saying how, how happy and how excited and how grateful I am that all of you are here today.

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Of course. Thank Mary for the invitations. Great to come to Oxford.

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It's kind of like my only opportunity to come and catch up with friends, you know?

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So I was also very excited, you know, if you saw me going in and hugging, you know,

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several people, I like to be hugs, but also, you know, I was just excited.

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And I want to before I start with the presentation, I want to give you a quick sense of where my research comes from.

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I was born and raised in Mexico in a very small community.

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When I I remember when I first started doing my research, I used to tell people it's not even on Google.

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You know, it was that tiny. I was like, No, come on, it has to be there.

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Like, it wasn't me. And this community relied for its mobility.

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You know, we were it's in the state of Michoacan. Perhaps some of you have heard about this state.

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It has not so popular tradition.

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We are there. So we have very serious issues with drug trafficking organisations and organised crime.

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But this was also what used to be called the cradle of Mexican migration.

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So everybody, especially in the case of men, was expected to migrate.

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And all the men from my community starting in the 1960s from, let's say,

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the 1960s to pretty much the 1990s, relied on facilitators to cross the border.

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So I was one of the few members of my family who did not, and all my relatives used to make fun of me.

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It was like, Oh, come on, you didn't suffer. Like, Oh, we like you didn't cross the border, you flew in.

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That doesn't count. And but I never thought that I was going to end up studying or documenting this processes.

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That came a few years later when, in fact, after I was able to attain legal status to work in the United States.

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And the very first job that I was given was in. Detention. I got to speak Spanish.

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And this was in the state of Arizona along the US-Mexico border.

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Some of you have probably heard, you know, a few years back about Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

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He used to force inmates to wear pink underwear,

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set up a tent out in the middle of the desert to bring in people who had been arrested for minimal offences.

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Well, he was my boss for seven years. Mm hmm. And initially, I was assigned to the drug trafficking research unit.

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And eventually there was a shift when it came to enforcement priorities.

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And migration became popular politically.

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And at that point, they decided that it was a very good idea to set up a smuggling investigative unit.

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So I was assigned to this group. And when I first started doing this job, which involved carrying out investigations,

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criminal investigations in the community with the people who had been impacted by the crimes,

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but most importantly, what the people who had been charged for smuggling.

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I started to realise that there was a narrative that didn't match the one that as a court officer I had to apply whenever I went to court saying,

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well, this is organised crime.

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This person is part of a very vast network that just extends across borders and is facilitating the migration of the irregular migration of people.

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And the one that was coming from all investigations, from all of my exchanges with the people in detention,

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not a single time I came across a smuggling kingpin or any kind of network or people making thousands of dollars over their involvement.

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In fact, most of the people that I interviewed over those years where undocumented migrants themselves, single mothers and elderly couples,

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families who had disabled children, who were trying to make a living out of facilitating the journeys of people who were crossing the border.

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And there was no criminal intention on their part to become involved in the activity.

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This was also very much embedded within the community.

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So while law enforcement was setting up this distance or raids to catch the people and certainly catch people,

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facilitators were operating in public places, markets outside of churches because they were not hidden.

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This was a resource for mobility that was available to communities.

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So that was my introduction to the topic.

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I quit my job to go and get a Ph.D.

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And in fact, my first book is based on interviews and contacts with 66 smuggling facilitators,

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some of them women because women are involved in the smuggling facilitation.

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Despite this images are representations that you get to see of the African smuggler,

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the Muslim smuggler, the groups that are so dominant in the rhetoric of smuggling in Europe.

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And from there, from following the completion of my Ph.D., I've been very fortunate to do additional research in other parts of the world,

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always trying to understand the facilitation of mobility.

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And I'm going to tell you why I don't call it smuggling per se. Rick, why should we question the the word?

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Because I see the how I've been able to document again,

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how much this is part of a sense of community and mobility that many times has become not only criminalised, but a historicist.

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And we'll talk about that in just one second. Today's presentation and I'm try to I am going to try to go through it as fast as I can,

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but at the same time to provide you as much detail as I can so that we can also have a very productive Q&A.

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I'm very much looking forward to your questions. Is related to the work that I have been carried out at the NPC for the last year or so.

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This was a field work that was part of the Horizon 2020 initiative on security in North Africa, and especially in particular the migrant smuggling.

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Please check back in here at the factory. You can that.

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Okay. If not, I'll just speak up. I just don't like the sound.

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So in here, you know. You can see my picture.

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So when I first joined this initiative, one of the concerns I had was the very language that was being used as part of the project.

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Migration was articulated very much as a threat, something that had to be contained,

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that had to be stopped, and particularly, you know, irregular migration from North Africa.

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Most of us, I think, again, especially in the context of, you know, UK and Europe,

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these have become pretty acquainted to this narrative of Libya as the main source of concern when it comes to and migrant smuggling.

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And the very language of the initiative of the project that I was part of referring to

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Libya as an area of limited statehood or posing a threat to the security of the EU,

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already gives you a sense of what was the direction of the project.

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It was pretty much identified where going to be the tipping points, where we had to identify the risks,

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how many smuggling operators in this case where operating within Libya and many of these concerns

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followed the now infamous video from CNN showing what they depicted as slave market markets in Libya.

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You probably got to see that quick video with this blurry faces where some men who appear to be of what we typically know,

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sub-Saharan or sub-Saharan African migrants were being traded or bartered by.

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We didn't see the voices in the video, but there you don't see the faces, but you can hear those voices.

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And speaking in Arabic again, communicating this notion that Libyans are the ones that are facilitating the exploitation of migrants,

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and especially with the label of trafficking, human trafficking or Mother Nature slavery.

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So my role as part of the project was to again determine the scenarios that would lead to the growth of migrant smuggling in Libya,

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what that could mean to the security of the EU. And I was assigned to you know, I was asked to produce two case studies,

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one precisely on the challenges that were posed by smuggling facilitators within Tunisia,

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and another one on that focus that was central specifically on Libya.

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So today I'm going to share with you that in a sense, it's still very preliminary findings from that second case study.

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I don't want to be turning like this, but I didn't want to be standing there. So just I'm just going to stand.

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So there's there were a few issues, of course,

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with that of the messaging and the narratives that were connected with smuggling or that were connected with the overall project.

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But there's here I identify for that. From my experience as somebody carrying out research and mobility facilitation, we've raised concerns.

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First of all, the hyper emphasis on militias and tribes that has been mobilised in the case of Libya,

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this very Orientalist depiction of Oh God, I just length of the name Lawrence of Arabia.

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Like, you know, there's militias out there in the middle of nowhere in catching migrants,

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trying to get them into distant locations and that that's here and exploit them where the smugglers are.

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Again, was this very specific, a specifically gendered and racialised persona of a male Muslim smuggler?

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I think the last time I was here actually showed some of the images, but I don't think that I have to share them with you.

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You just have to think about some of this representations that are very common or commonly used to describe smuggling.

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And also, again, there was this focus on the sub-Saharan African body, black men, precisely.

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There was, of course, this ahistorical treatment of mobility in the region.

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We tend to hear not only as part of the media discourse, but also the policy discourse,

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that mobility of this kind is unprecedented, that this had never been seen before,

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that levels of exploitation like this have never been documented in the region, and in fact,

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that these militias and tribes have reached, again, unprecedented reach and need to be contained.

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And all of them, of course, you know, their only objective is to get people.

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You know, across the Mediterranean into Europe, there was another key element of this narrative that keeps popping up.

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And in fact, we're going to spend some time talking about that today.

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The trope of modern day slavery or the slaves that came out of that video.

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But most importantly, and for those of you who are right now thinking of going out to the field or who are or who are,

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they are carrying out some of the research. I had concerns of the methodological level.

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Most of the work, most of the research,

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most of the data that is coming out of Libya comes from a very or has been generated by a very small group of researchers.

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Most of them are men, European men, who have gained access to Libya.

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So we really and the lens that most of them have used has been pretty much the lands of security.

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These are men who probably who know probably who go and carry out some of this research,

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protected many times with by their organisations that support financially their journeys.

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And they have pretty much dictated that this course coming out of Libya, if you look at the reports,

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all we hear about is detention centres, slavery, the boats, the militias.

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There's really no discussion or no conversation outside of those margins.

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And some think that as somebody who has also carried out, again,

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this research in other parts of the world and who is very much he might be doing comparative work,

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there's I also have this concern that this has silenced or has systematically,

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structurally silenced local researchers, the ability of Libyan scholars themselves to produce their work and being able to share it outside of Libya,

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if it's on the grounds again that it's too dangerous for them or that they don't know how to do it.

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But of course, for you, researchers have the ability to do so. This slide right here summarises some of the points that we back up a little over.

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About four or five years ago, a group of us researchers, primarily sociocultural anthropologists,

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started to come together to bring together our empirical work on the facilitation of mobility.

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And this are some of the ideas that as a cohort we have been mobilising.

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We are critical, for example,

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of this criminological or hyper criminological angle that or the criminological angle that dominates the conversation of migrant smuggling.

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The very fact that we refer to it as a smuggling already infers or implies that we are framing it as a crime.

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The facilitation of mobility is not a crime.

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And in fact, in many countries, despite the fact that we refer to it as smuggling,

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many countries do not have legislation that typifies that as a crime.

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So we tend to use it as a term has become migrant smuggling has become a very use term.

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But we really have to understand that it's come it comes or is derived from this criminological angle.

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There is, of course the very strong literature in the migration industry and brokerage and the economics of illegality.

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One of the concerns that we had at the time was precisely the fact that we were not only seeing this notion of production or monetary exchange,

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but that we understood it as part of a community and collective knowledge how people move,

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how people generate the knowledge, the information, and also how they share protection when they move.

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Just think about your own journeys. Whenever you travel, whenever you go to places where you get lost, who helps you along the way?

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Who have been the people who have helped you? Who have rescued you at some point?

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This is also very much based on this angle's draw quite a bit from feminist scholarship concerning Labour

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because we understand the facilitation of migrant journeys as a form of intimate labour for they preserve life.

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If those it's those of you who have work with migrants who can't or who come from a migrant background,

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have probably at some time documented or heard stories of how people care for each other.

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Along the migration pathway is the kind of support that is provided.

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The friendships that get developed along the way, the love that emerge in something that emerges from those people.

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So it's not only this narrative of pain or pain or suffering or abuse and exploitation,

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but also one of care and trust that is indeed braided with profit.

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So here we are not talking about them being separate entities or categories, but actually them coming together.

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They are not separate. And when you come, they come together over migration, purpose you.

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We understand this facilitation of migrant journeys. Again, not smuggling for that is the crime.

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Though we criminological term as an informal form of labour, we can deeply embedded in community formation.

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So the question for the project became no longer.

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You know, again, what are the tipping points or how are smuggling organisations situated or what?

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What can we learn about the networks and their extent? But what are their relationships that exist in the facilitation of migrant journeys?

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Tell us about the conditions experienced on the ground not only by migrants, but the people people who live in Libya.

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And that is because migrants are not separated from the community.

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We really wanted to understand what was happening with the communities, had large how they understood each other,

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how they interacted with one another, and what we could learn from that day to day interaction.

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If that is not present, that is so absent from the way media tends to talk about facilitation of mobility.

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Here we go to. Well, how do you do it? How do you how do you actually go and talk with people in the field?

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Many times going back to the Libyan case. We've read about all of the stories that portray many researchers as adventurers.

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You go out and you find the militias.

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You know, when you go and you talk to a guy that has, you hear I'm in a sense, making a little bit of fun of some of that literature.

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Now, I went and I talked to all RB Mohammed and he welcomed me to his home.

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And that's how I got access to the secret side of the militias in the desert.

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You don't really need to do that. In in that is that is something that our work has been able to document one, you know, several times along the way.

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And that is, again, because the facilitation of mobility is deeply embedded in the community.

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So when we go out to carry out this research, we don't go to communities asking like, Oh, did you know this mother's in if we're going to find them?

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You can't imagine what would happen to us if we ever did that right.

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Because my people would not only laugh at us, we probably will chase us out of tune.

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So but we did a for for is a specific project.

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I did carry out a qualitative strategy, very much aware of the restrictions involving the war, involving carrying out research, whether it's in Libya.

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So the closest option was to go to Tunisia to the border that it shares from Libya.

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This was also part of the restrictions that the EU that the European University placed,

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mostly because of security for work for me as a researcher and I carried out this field work during the first quarter of this year.

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So it was January, February and March, and it involved visits to migrant smuggling, hopes to what are your end?

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And also some some of the documents from the EU defined as migrant smuggling cuts across the country being special attention to Tunisia,

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Libya, border dynamics here as in many other borders.

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But I was able to document and what other researchers have already also been able to

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document is the president of the presence of multiple illicit illegal sized economies in.

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Once you start driving into or down to Tunisia, closer to the border,

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you see a lot of fuels dense with this fuel that is being smuggled from Libya into the country.

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And surprisingly, migrant smuggling was not a big deal because it ranked in terms of interest

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or attention that was paid to it was not really that much of a of a concern.

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What really mattered to people was to get fuel for their vehicles.

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So smuggling was not at the top of their concerns.

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The data was also supplemented by qualitative interviews that are carried out with migrants

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living in Italy in the context of a smaller project that we had going on at the ICC.

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This where the Bangladeshi and men from sub-Saharan African countries who had spent time in Libya and actually been there

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and who had been quote unquote successful in their journeys across the Mediterranean with the assistance of facilitators.

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And in terms of methodology, this was a grounded theory approach.

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You know, theory developed from the data. It was very much following or allowing the respondents to guide the very direction of the inquiry.

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So what what do what have we been able to document there?

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What were the the some of the first initial findings in some of this may come as a surprise to several of you.

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Again, knowing how much the narrative and the message coming out of Libya and or Libya is how mediated it is.

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But migration into Libya is still quite strong. People are coming to this.

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They into Libya. Despite all of this representations and all the images of conflict and kills, people are coming in.

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That's primarily because the conditions across the countries,

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throughout the countries where the people are migrants are coming from are remain unchanged.

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The possibility of finding jobs primarily need formal activities or formal labour are still considered quite strong by migrants going there.

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This includes North African migrants. So that is people from Tunisia, people from Egypt have continued to travel into Libya.

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Something bad being on the Tunisian side of the border is very telling.

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Of that situation was the very fact that many people had actually crossed the border from Libya into Tunisia at some

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point and decided to go back to Libya because they decided or they perceived the conditions as less productive for them.

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They were not as safe. They didn't feel as safe staying in Tunisia as they did when they were in Libya.

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And we can talk about this notion of perceptions of safety.

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Of course, another factor was the high value of the Libyan currency.

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Despite the valuation, the Libyan dinar has the highest value of all the currencies in North Africa.

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And there was also, of course, the issue of scant cash availability.

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Cash is not readily available.

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When you go to Libya, which has implications in terms of labour that we're going to be talking about later in the presentation.

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But most importantly, did stakeholders and people in general described was this concern,

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this overall concern over the hyper emphasis of the detention facility because of how,

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again, the message that is coming out from Libya, as everybody said, the detention facilities, look at what is happening there.

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It's horrible. We need to stop it.

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If you look at official numbers, 4 million people in detention facilities is estimated to be about 1% of the entire migrant population in Libya.

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Of course, here I'm not saying that they don't matter or that we should not care,

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but rather to understand how that very small group or the conditions of this small group are helping define the policy for an entire country.

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And this has not been questioned in the sense that all of the responses, all of the policy,

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all of the policy responses and policing responses have focussed primarily on people in detention,

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when, again, this is a very small portion of those in the country, migrants in the country.

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Another factor, what's important for for me in terms of deciding the research was again,

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not not to understand Libya monolithically when realistically because that is that's the very way we talk about the countries that way.

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It's just Libya as if it was just this mass in uniform place.

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So and this is primarily given the restrictions that I have in terms of access, but I also divided the findings in regions.

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But I was able to document along the border, going to the border region and what the migrants themselves were reporting,

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what's happening in Tripoli and the surrounding areas.

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So who is behind the facilitation of migrant journeys?

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Why long border regions? Well, this is actually run by local populations.

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So local people whose presence and also involvement in the facilitation of mobility goes back not only to the years of the revolution in 2011,

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Ben Affleck but and this is something that creates some confusion when we bring it up.

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But people have been engaged in the facilitation of mobility not for centuries, perhaps for thousands of years.

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Facilitating transits, allowing people to travel throughout the desert, and most importantly,

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relying on this community knowledge to facilitate or transit has been part of the tradition of many of this.

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So this is not new. It's is the way that the language they became involved was definitely not new.

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And the label of militias and tribes actually obscures the levels of marginalisation that they face.

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So these are, again, communities that are hours away from let alone a medium sized city for that.

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And this are regions of the country that are have not only been forgotten under the regime,

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but which very location made it very difficult for anybody to access them to get to

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to where they were located in as we have been able to document in other regions.

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This facilitation of mobility became a strategy to reduce the levels of local inequality.

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What do I mean by that? The earnings, whichever earnings that are generated by smuggling, are immediately recirculated into the economy.

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We have this idea from a primarily comes from representations that are circulating in the media that smuggling facilitators and thousands,

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if not millions or trillions or trillions of dollars for their trade.

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The actual earnings are very small.

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If when you are in a part every month of the country, there is very little that you can do with that money or perhaps reinvesting it.

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Again, this is this earnings benefit.

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Not only the, quote unquote, smugglers themselves or the facilitators, but actually the people they live with, the people in the community.

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There's a lot of concern on the part of international organisations as well because they have seen

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an increase in the numbers of women and children who have joined the process of facilitation,

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also in an attempt to reduce their levels of marginalisation and precarity.

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Kind of on a side note, this is the work that women and children perform is also part of the project that I have on the US-Mexico border,

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which reveals very similar outcomes.

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I'll be happy to share those with you as well. But so that was the part of the country that I had access to.

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It was again methodologically impossible for me to go to into Libya, but the migrants themselves had a lot to say about their time there,

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and they pretty much guided the conversation in terms of when it comes to when it came to describing what their everyday life was.

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There was was like when they were in Tripoli time you so we tend to there there's a very

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I think one of the main finding so or differences rather that emerge from the the data

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was the fact that along the coast and also when you just in Tripoli itself there was no

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migrants were more likely than locals to be involved in the facilitation of journeys.

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And what were they doing?

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Well, they were very much involved with recruiting, recruiting all their migrants, trying to help them, to help them, to help get them on the boats.

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That's a very common strategy and facilitation.

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You get a reduction of your fee or you actually get to travel for free if you are able to get enough people in the boat.

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So migrants were very active on that.

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They were also given a reduction of their fees if they agreed to pilot some of the boats, which has also been extensively documented.

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There were also reports of how eventually many of those who had become stuck in a sense,

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or who had no other ways of earning or generating an income, had relied on extortion or in kidnappings.

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And more. A lot of the work was not only carried out for me.

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In fact, migrants never, never mentioned or never never refer to the people in the city in this context as smugglers or anything like what?

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Brokers. That was the actual word that keep popping up.

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Brokers and brokers were not only people from Libya many times or Libyans themselves many times.

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They were also migrants who have been in the country for a very long period of time.

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People who were already established in-country and who were facilitating themselves.

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Migrant journeys. Coordinating them. And something that was similar to what I was able to document along the border was the fact

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that the facilitation of journeys is producing employment or even employment opportunities.

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So I'll talk about income in a second, not only for.

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For smuggling, facilitation, smugglers, smuggling facilitators, but for people in the community.

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And this is because, once again, labour opportunities are limited.

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But let's see, where do I see myself as a disillusioned with the right not only for migrants,

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but also for people who are already living within within Libya, who have been there for a long period of time.

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One aspect that kept that has been documented in the form of many, many migrants who have actually made it to Europe.

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Many of them really did not want to come to Europe.

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Europe was not part of their plans. And when you ask them, then you know, what happened?

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What was how was life in Libya like for you? There were specific moments,

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the specific experiences that eventually led them to or led them to decide to to

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get on one of the boats or look for the services of a smuggling facilitator.

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Many times this experience has involved kidnapping, extortion, series of robberies.

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But it was also many times the outcome of family pressure, families demanding money.

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In a country where you can't really make a lot of it,

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you may be able to find a job to work for an employer for some time in exchange for room and board, but not generate actual income.

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That was for many of the people that I interviewed.

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One of the decision making elements.

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Well, you know, my family's putting pressure on me. I've been kidnapped or threatened with being kidnapped.

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I'm losing money.

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Another factor that was very kept that was mentioned several times was the fact that there was the amount of money that they had paid for.

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Let me rephrase this, that their initial smuggling fee, what they had paid to get to Libya, they had not been able to pay that off.

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And the inability to make any more payments had actually played a role in their decision to travel somewhere out of Libya.

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But the notion of Europe was not necessarily part of how they described their journeys.

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Very few people, and this is from my experience, this was also very similar to what I used to to see along the US-Mexico border.

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People used to say that they were going north if it was almost a naughty U.S.,

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but there was no clear definition of what I'm going to this specific state and going to this specific city.

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There was just a different space that they were migrating to.

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I think this is one of the again, one of the questions on everybody's minds and something that I'm asked about constantly.

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You're frequently like, well, but what about human trafficking?

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There were again the videos and we cannot deny and I am on and please do not think that that's what I'm doing,

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but I'm denying the suffering or that I don't believe that people are experiencing exploitation.

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And in the case of Libya, really just trying to understand what is actually happening on the ground.

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So human trafficking, we have to take that critical look at the term was, in fact,

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not much of a concern in terms of the in the very term, the very articulation of the term, the human not.

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I think human trafficking is very much of a Western trope in how we think

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about the relationships and labour of relationships that emerge among people.

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People did speak about being sold, but this was not in the same sense that we understand being sold or being a slave,

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but rather it was part of an exchange of this bartering of labour.

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People would go and sell their own labour to others, especially in the case.

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But in a situation like Libya, when there's not a lot of cash around or cash available and there's a high need for protection.

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So what many migrants used, many migrants described doing,

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was they would go and find an employer in work for him or her in exchange, again, for room and board.

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Occasionally, some of those employers were able to pay them a little bit of money, but if not,

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migrants trade that many migrants were okay with that in the sense that being in a steady place,

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in a safe place, where they were not required to travel to other parts of the city, providing them with a sense of safety and stability.

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And so, again,

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what we see here are primarily mostly labour interactions that emerge from the lack of available cash rather than specific forms of exploitation.

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At the same time, it is very clear that migrants are not always able to control the conditions of that exploitation.

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What that means is an employer can probably can continue demanding labour or it can, for example, stop providing a place to stay or providing food.

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And many of these cases, migrants will just leave because they were not staying there.

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They are not going to for many of those things to happen.

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And but again, this these relationships are mutual.

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They are not only you know, it's not only what happens to the migrants, but also how the people who employ them may benefit from this.

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So from this interactions. So this kind of exchange allowed employers many times migrants themselves to have access to labour as well or even safety.

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There were many references in the throughout the interviews of how people used to say that they would care for one another.

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Their employers used to care for them, but they would also protect their employers, take care of their children.

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Many times employers would pay smuggling fees for migrants as well so that they could travel.

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So once again, there's this level of care, exchange and partnership that is very much obscured by the narratives of human trafficking and slavery.

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Okay. So I think we have we're going to have plenty of time for for discussion.

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But I'm moving, too, to the conclusions.

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Think if I if I want for if I want you to take away one idea from the presentation

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is the fact that the facilitation of mobility is a strategy to counter precarity.

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That's the bottom line. People are not becoming rich.

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People are becoming wealthy, rather, from engaging in this activity.

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What we tend to label as migrant smuggling is an activity of the poor and for the poor.

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There's not hierarchies, there's no networks, there's no millions that are stored anywhere.

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These are people, most of the people who are ever detected or apprehended in the context of food mobility facilitation are

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people who are making this to supplement all of their incomes in other income from other sources of labour.

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But so in the case in the specific case of of Libya, what we see is this existence of a labour market that has come to rely on bartering.

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Given the the absence of cash or limits when it comes to cash, the very end.

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This is, again, where we can from the outside, we tend to label or we can label that as a form of exploitation.

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We also see this this emergence of transactions and with the lack of a stability.

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And, of course, increasing inequality and marginalisation.

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And then again, it's something that I always start with that I really ask people to think about.

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Again, the representations, the way migrant suffering tends to be circulated about the suffering migrant, the body of the suffering migrant,

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and the very orientalist and even imperialistic tropes that are associated with facilitation, in this case militias and tribes.

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The narrative of migrant smuggling is one of those perfect fictions exist.

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They allow to criminalise poor communities or marginalised communities under the label of organised crime,

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because it's very easy to just say it's organised crime. Who did that?

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Or It's the organised crime networks.

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And again, this claims of of migrant smuggling generating this very large profits are really not sustainable from what we get to see on the evidence.

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And this is, again,

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because we see this convergence of the paths that migrants use for their journeys with the existence of very marginalised and isolated communities.

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But I think one of the well, the two most important points to take away primarily with in the case of Libya,

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it's that we need to start thinking beyond the narrative of smuggling.

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We need to start thinking beyond slavery, especially because Libya is here to stay.

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It's not going to go anywhere. And there's no really clear strategy when it comes to policy wise and what is going to happen in the country.

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And by only narrowing it down to the conditions in detention,

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we think we are perpetuating or facilitating wide spread of inequality across the country.

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So any solution or any kind of alternative that is proposed or articulated for Libya at this time is going to have to

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understand that the facilitation of journeys has become an essential part of the way in which people generate an income,

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especially amid marginalisation and inequality can stop right there.

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And I would just thank you for your attention, and I look forward to your questions.