Can Migrants do Europe’s Border Work in Africa?

Since the 1990s, the European Union (EU) and its Member States have been funding information and awareness-raising initiatives to deter irregular immigration. These programmes increasingly rely on the involvement of intermediaries with a migration background in so-called “peer-to-peer” information dissemination activities targeted other migrants and local communites.

Their “peerness” is considered an efficient tool to gain (potential) migrants’ trust, and ultimately enforce migration and border control. However, while “peerness” between migrants and intermediaries is generally taken for granted, a new article shows that it is crossed by conflicting dynamics and generates contrasted effects on the ground.

In this new Journal of Borderlands Studies article DIIS researcher Ida Marie Savio Vammen, Anissa Maá and Julia Van Dessel critically examine and deconstruct the taken for granted notion of “peerness” attributed to migrants in their roles as intermediaries.

They bring together empirical insights from three case studies, each of which engage with an emblematic figure of “migrant intermediation”: the Senegalese “diaspora” in the EU, “transit migrants” in Morocco, and “returnees” in Senegal to show how various migration experiences are captured and defined as “peerness” for European control purposes, and, simultaneously, how it is mobilized and enacted by migrant actors in different contexts.

The article highlights that “peer-to-peer” information dissemination entails inherent tensions and contradictions which can ultimately come to challenge European driven efforts to control African migration. Finally, it demonstrates that beyond the question of its efficiency, “migrant intermediation” transforms and reinforces both social hierarchies and relations of power within local migration industries.