Dr Hassan Ould Moctar

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS, University of London. He holds a PhD in Development Studies which he obtained from SOAS and has held teaching and research positions in SOAS and the LSE. Focusing on West Africa and the Sahara, his research bridges the fields of anthropology and development studies through the study of migration and borders. He is particularly interested in how the contemporary illegalisation of migration interacts with the racial and territorial legacies of colonialism, uneven development processes, and conflict and displacement dynamics. Through ethnography, his work details how these structural intersections shape the subjective experience of West African migrants – who also nonetheless contest them – and how this interplay unfolds in situated urban locales in the region. Hassan is the author of After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania, which is available open access with Bloomsbury Publishers. The book offers an original analysis of the European Union's tendency to extend its migration and border control operations into the Global South, detailing how this process relates to history and social relations in the West African state of Mauritania. Drawing from 11 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the country, the book demonstrates how the EU border regime intervenes within a colonial legacy of racialized territorial belonging and the dynamics of capitalist development in West Africa. Hassan’s research has also been published in leading anglophone academic journals such as Environment and Planning: D and Geoforum, and francophone journals Anthropologie et développement and l’Ouest Saharien. He sits on the Advisory/Executive Board of the Centre for Maghrib Studies at Arizona State University, and has been awarded fellowships by the Economic and Social Research Council and the National University of Ireland.

Hassan regularly disseminates his work beyond academia through consulting, advocacy, and public engagement. He has written for numerous outlets – including Al-Jazeera, Open Democracy, New Left Review’s Sidecar blog, Statewatch, and Jadaliyya – and has consulted for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and the UNHCR. He also participates in transnational migration solidarity initiatives.

Hassan is also a passionate educator and has convened modules, delivered lectures, and facilitated seminars in SOAS and the LSE, where he was awarded a class teacher award in 2023. This teaching experience covers critical migration and border studies, development studies, and violence and conflict studies.