Borderwork - Migrants, Brokers and European Border Governance in West Africa
Borderwork - An Ethnographic Study of Migrants, Brokers and European Border Governance in West Africa
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 individual, social and political forms of struggle over mobility also defined as Borderwork.
Focusing on West Africa, this research project explores competing notions of borderwork in the expanded borderlands in a time when safe and legal mobility is limited and human, social, and political conditions of migrants are severely challenged.
The Borderwork research project runs from 2018-2021 and is carried out by three DIIS researchers working in Mali, Niger and Senegal. The project is funded by the Danish Research Council and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS).