Borderwork in West Africa

Workshop in Dakar, Senegal, 29-30 January 2019

In recent years West Africa has become the scene for a wide range of European interventions with the purpose of restraining sub-Saharan migration to Europe, creating an accelerated moment of control and confinement. This development has created new and contested EU-African borderlands that give rise to particular individual, social and political forms of struggle over mobility or ‘borderwork’. Often, however, the effort to impede movement creates resistance from below, which ensure long-held practices and hopes of social and material advancement through mobility are kept alive.

This workshop launched a new research programme on borderwork in Senegal, Niger and Mali, coordinated at DIIS: Borderwork: Migrants, Brokers and European Border Governance in West Africa. The workshop in Dakar gathered a number of prominent scholars and experts to explore various intersecting forms of borderwork in West Africa at a time when safe and legal mobility is limited and the human, social, and political conditions of migrants are severely challenged.

Workshop participants and papers presented

Hans Lucht, DIIS

Ida Marie Savio Vammen, DIIS

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, DIIS

Bakary Sambe, Timbuktu Institute: Islam subsaharien et les enjeux de la migration: quel intérêt pour les politiques de prévention de la radicalisation?

Cheikh Tidiane Wade, Ziguinchor University: Stratégies de Gestion des Migrations: Recommandations sous régionales, logiques d’acteurs et initiatives nationales, Le temps de l’action

Ekaterina Golovko (Netherlands Institute of International Relations) and Vanessa Leigh (Université de Liège): Smuggling in Mali and Niger: empirical data collected by 4Mi

Eva Magdalena Stambøl, Freie Universität Berlin: The EU’s Fight Against Transnational Crime in the Sahel

Giulia Sinatti, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: Migration-Development Nexus and Migration-Asylum Nexus: European Policy and the Intersections Between Anti-Migration Efforts and Struggles over Mobility

Gregory Feldman, University of Windsor: Judging people’s movements: Technocracy, ethics, and the isolating effects of a migration-security apparatus

Lanfia Diane, Ministère Economie et Finances:

Politique nationale de migration du Sénégal

Line Richter, University of Copenhagen: Connecting the dots. Everyday borderwork in Mali and beyond

Luca Raineri, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies: Can hard borders break fragile states? A laboratory test: governance and smuggling in Niger

María Hernández-Carretero, University of Oslo: Migration desires, risk information and migration projects

Paolo Gaibazzi, Universität Bayreuth: EurAfrican Frontiers of Border Externalization

Papa Sakho, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar: Review of the National Migration Policy Development Process: lessons on managing the pressure on national authorities by European policies and international institutions