Introduction to the Special Issue: Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands

Europe has been deeply involved in the management of African borders for centuries, from the trading posts of precolonial times to the negotiation of the colonial boundaries at the 1884 Congress of Berlin. In recent years, Africa has been targeted by a wide range of European interventions with the purpose of restraining sub-Saharan migration to Europe, creating an unprecedented moment of control and confinement.

This Special Issue of Geopolitics, Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands, edited by DIIS researchers Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde,  Ida Marie Savio Vammen and Hans Lucht, moves beyond current much-discussed events and atrocities at Europe’s immediate frontiers to unpack the deeply historical policies and emerging practices that shape everyday lives and mobilities in EU-African borderlands.

The contributions in this issue explore how African lives continue to be deeply entangled with Europe’s present and historical fantasy of Africa, and of African territories and bodies, as tabulae rasa calling out for governance.

In this Special Issue we draw attention to how this fantasy is contested and reshaped by social and political realities on the ground, and how European efforts to bring about an EU border ‘dreamworld’ are both assisted and resisted, often with severe consequences, by local actors with agendas of their own.

You can read the entire Special Issue here with a Taylor & Francis subscription or see the list of individual contributions below.

Authors and papers

Ida Marie Savio Vammen, Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde and Hans Lucht, DIIS: Introduction to the Special Issue: Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands

Tekalign Ayalew Mengiste, Addis Ababa University: Intensifications of Border Governance and Defiant Migration Trajectories in Ethiopia

Marthe Achtnich, University of Oxford: Waiting to Move On: Migration, Borderwork and Mobility Economies in Libya

Philippe M. Frowd, University of Ottawa: Borderwork Creep in West Africa’s Sahel

Almamy Sylla, University of Bamako, and Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, DIIS: En Route to Europe? The Anti-politics of Deportation from North Africa to Mali

Luca Raineri, School of Advanced Studies, Pisa: The Bioeconomy of Sahel Borders: Informal Practices of Revenue and Data Extraction

Line Richter, University of Copenhagen: Moral Borderwork: Policies, Policing, and Practices of Migrant Smuggling at the EU-Morocco Border

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, DIIS: Borderwork in the Grey Zone: Everyday Resistance within European Border Control Initiatives in Mali

Ida Marie Savio Vammen, DIIS: ‘When Migrants Become Messengers’: Affective Borderwork and Aspiration Management in Senegal

Polly Pallister-Wilkins, University of Amsterdam: Afterword: Alter-geographies of Everyday Externalisation: Shattering EUropean Attempts at Policing Mobility?