The long shadow of the border

This summer, we continue to witness horrific human tragedies on the Mediterranean Sea, when migrants attempt to cross from Africa to Europe in search of refuge and a more dignified life.

Though these events receive significant media and political attention, a new edited volume ’The Long Shadow of the Border. Migrants Brokers and European Border Governance in Africa’ goes beyond the dramatic images of African migrants struggling to scale border fences or cross the sea to Europe in unseaworthy rubber dinghies. Instead the book attempts to unpack the policies and emerging practices that shape contemporary border governance in the expanding EU–African borderlands.

For decades, Africa has been the scene of a wide range of European interventions aimed at restraining irregularised migration to Europe creating an accelerated moment of control and confinement. Today, the externalisation of Europe’s borders into Africa encompasses agreements on the return of migrants, securitised border operations, and within recent years also projects under the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. At a time when safe and legal mobility is limited, and the human, social and political conditions of African migrants are severely challenged, the book emphasises how European efforts are both assisted but also resisted by local actors with agendas of their own.

The volume is an outcome of the Borderwork research program and is edited by DIIS researchers Hans Luch, Signe Cold-Ravnkilde, and Ida Marie Vammen, who also contributes with an introduction to the book and individual chapters. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, they along with the other contributions vividly portray how African lives continue to be shaped by Europe’s desire to contain and govern human mobility and how dominant spatial geopolitics are contested on various levels.