Themed week on border externalisation in Africa

The EU’s current attempts to restrain sub-Saharan migration to Europe from Africa are often manifested in multiple externalization practices on the ground often with a negative and sometimes violent impact for people on the move. This development calls for sustained scholarly attention.

Today, the externalization of Europe’s borders into Africa encompasses bilateral agreements on the return of migrants, military and security operations, and projects under the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa which blurs humanitarian, security, development and migration aims framed in language of fighting/combating so-called ‘root causes’ of irregular migration).

This Themed Week of University of Oxfords’ s Border Criminologies blog puts European attempts to control migration within and from Africa under scrutiny and explores new, unintended and unexpected effects while recognizing their colonial legacy of wanting to govern African lives and mobility.

The posts bring together new knowledge and insights from the DIIS border work research program’s recent Special Issue in Geopolitics, Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands that examines the impacts of contemporary European migration management on everyday lives and mobilities in African countries. The blog posts focus on the ‘sites of struggle’ where EU border governance combines with multiple global and local political interests. We are excited to share this work which connects highly localised contexts to concepts and analyses which are applicable to other settings in which Western states engage in externalisation efforts, for example the USA and Australia.

Read the blog post here and go to the links to get full access to the articles, on which the pieces are based, they will be free to access for the next month.