The Struggle over Mobility: EU Border Externalization and Everyday Borderwork in Africa

In recent years, Africa has become the scene for a wide range of European interventions with the purpose of restraining sub-Saharan Africans’ migration to Europe. In Niger, for instance, border guards are trained to detect smuggling networks and push back migrants. New biometric border technologies are being implemented to enhance control of individuals, and international organizations and donor agencies frequently try to deter potential migrants from journeying to Europe through information campaigns.

This panel brought together researchers working with diverse ethnographic methods to explore the way in which forms of ‘border work’ are being produced in the new and contested EU-African borderlands. The event sought to tease out the different types of everyday European border work at play on the continent. What kind of old and new actors are involved and what types of collaboration emerge between them? What are the rationales behind the interventions, and in what ways do they reassemble former colonial forms of population governance and unequal power relations? And what kinds of resistance from below emerge to ensure long-held practices and hopes of social and material advancement through mobility are kept alive?

Workshop participants

Gregory Feldman, University of Windsor: What is a Polity?: Action, ethnography, and thinking against the state in the 21^st century

Hans Lucht, DIIS: ‘The EU is Setting Fire to the Sahel’: Migrants and Brokers in Agadez, Niger

Ida Marie Savio Vammen, DIIS: When Migrants Become Messengers: Aspirational Management in Senegal

Marthe Achtnich, University of Oxford: Informal Bordering Economies and Migrants’ Mobilities in Libya

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, DIIS: Disorder at a Distance: EU Border Management Interventions in Mali

Wendy Vogt, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis: Mothers in Movement: Gendered Violence, Care, and Activism along the Migrant Route in Mexico