9 - Conclusion

Summary

The Conclusion returns to the book’s central ambition: to leverage the contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia for more systematic theory-building on immigration politics beyond the liberal state. I summarize my key empirical and theoretical propositions and reflect on how they contribute to research on Moroccan and Tunisian migration politics, theories of immigration policy, and broader comparative politics, international relations, and political sociology scholarship. I also reflect on the most promising avenues for consolidating theory-building on immigration policymaking across the Global North/Global South and democracy/autocracy divides in the future. In particular, I hope to inspire readers to question the analytical power of binary categories such as democracy or autocracy for theorizing political processes, and to mobilize immigration policy as a lens to research political change and the inner workings of modern states.