The global South as a solution to cope with the crisis: Following the transnational itineraries of the precarised Spaniards towards Algeria

Abstract

The rising economies in the global South have been a destination of expatriates, businessmen, and high-skilled migrants during the bonanza times. A move to these places was seen as cosmopolitan way to improve professional careers by acquiring international experience or higher quality of education. However, in the post-crisis context after the crash of 2008, the needs of the Southern European populace have changed due to the precarisation of their social contexts in terms of economic insecurity which instead have been pushed them to seek job opportunities across borders to avoid unemployment. In this article, we shed light on the transnational strategies performed by the precarised Spaniards moving to Algeria to cope with the constraints that the crisis initiated in their day-to-day needs. In doing so, under the lens of the transnational theory and the mobility turn, we performed multi-sited fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, based on in-depth interviews with participant observation of Spaniards who have developed a transnational strategy between both countries since 2005 to 2016. The goal of this longitudinal methodology was to identify how the effects of the crisis have encouraged the evolution of these transnational itineraries attending to the particular tensions when moving to this country culturally different in the other side of the Mediterranean. Through three specific cases, we show how these Spaniards reshaped their trajectories from short-term mobilities, punctual and voluntarily planned and scheduled, to circular mobilities, perceived as an imposition by the social context without the possibility to decide when to come back home.