Situated on the north-eastern coast of Morocco, the Spanish enclave of Melilla is a paradigmatic case of an unusual yet increasingly common kind of community. These are small, rather isolated communities with no industry or natural resources of their own, which rely heavily on capital and labour drawn from outside. Together with Ceuta, Melilla is one of the two only land borders between Europe and Africa. The enclave’s economic and political set up reflects its geopolitical importance. Across the border from Melilla lies the Moroccan province of Nador, home to one of the largest communities of Moroccan emigrants in Europe and a steady source of unskilled labour on which the Spanish enclave relies. Connections across the border are strong, including kinship links, employment networks and a wide range of both legal and illegal commercial transactions. Based on twelve months of fieldwork conducted on both sides of the border, this thesis departs from prevailing images of the borderland as either an abstract space of ‘creolisation’ and ‘hybridity’ or a locus of resistance to state power, and suggests, instead, that we carefully consider the large-scale political and economic processes through which places like Melilla and Nador are produced, and analyse the ways in which such global structures shape local reality. A fundamental aim of the thesis, therefore, is to elucidate the nature of the relations between space, place and capital at the Spanish-Moroccan frontier, and understand how such relations affect the lives of those who inhabit the region. This involves thinking about the language of a ‘community’ and the discourses and practices of morality that sustain it; analysing discourses of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ in contexts of institutionalised economic inequality; and understanding local conceptions of identity, morality and legitimacy, and how the three interact.

La ciudad autónoma de Melilla vive, con su particular ubicación geográfica, una inmigración cada vez creciente. Estudios anteriores en torno a la imagen mediática de los procesos migratorios en los últimos años están de acuerdo en que los medios propagan una conceptualización dominante de la inmigración, destacando la tendencia hacia su problematización, de forma que los inmigrantes están asociados con una amplia gama de amenazas.  A través de un análisis crítico del discurso y saliendo desde una perspectiva construccionista, esa tesina propone investigar hasta qué punto la inmigración está representada en los medios de comunicación como una amenaza, y en ese caso, cómo interactúan con las concepciones normativas del mundo, prestando atención a la teoría poscolonialista. El análisis destaca el movimiento de securitización y el resultado apunta a que los diarios de Melilla hablan de la inmigración principalmente en términos de seguridad, construyendo y distribuyendo una imagen de la inmigración como una amenaza a la ciudad y a toda la UE.

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The theme of this master's thesis is the phenomenon of wall in international relations, the aim of the following text is to analyze the selected border walls and their impact on international relations. The first chapter deals with theoretical concepts which are necessary for the analysis such as border and border wall. The second chapter analyzes historical border walls which are considered relevant - Great Wall of China, Hadrian´s Wall, Czechoslovak border fortifications and Berlin Wall. The third part focuses on current border walls as US-Mexican wall, Ceuta and Melilla border walls and Israeli West-Bank barrier. Finally, the aim of the epilogue is to outline the problem of "wall in the head".

Diploma thesis "The Political and Economic Relations of Spain and Morocco: interdependence or a security question? " deals with the political and economical relations of Spain and Morocco from the end of the 1950's to the present. The relationship between these two countries is based not only on mutual cooperation and support but also on mutual rivalry. The most sensitive area almost throughout the analyzed period is the fishing policy, and the territorial dispute over Western Sahara, Ceuta and Melilla, Sidi Ifni (Leila) and the island Isla de Perejil (arabic Leila). The main hypothesis of the thesis is that the relationship of Spain and Morocco corresponds to the neo-liberal theory and therefore a priority in their mutual relations is the economic objectives and to ensure the prosperity. The relation of these two countries doesn't correspond to the neo-realistic theory and the security objectives don't have high priority. We verified this hypothesis by using the Congruance Method, the comparative method of the study period and by the dependent and independent variables. Dependent variable include the political and economic relations and the independent variables include the economic reform in Morocco, mutual bilateral cooperation, fishing policy, the various Spanish governments' policies towards...