Ahlam Chemlali, PhD, is a Moroccan-Danish scholar and Postdoctoral Fellow at Aalborg University. Her research investigates the politics of life and death in transit, focusing on the gendered and local impacts of European border externalization in North Africa, especially the Tunisian-Libyan borderlands. Before academia, she spent nearly a decade at DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, working on migration, human rights, and violence. Combining ethnography, visual methods, and critical theory, her work has been published in Geopolitics, Trends in Organized Crime, JEMS, Forced Migration Review, Revue Tunisienne de Science Politique, as well as in The Los Angeles Times and The New Humanitarian.