Everyday resistance to European border control in Mali

On May 5, 2021, the Danish government reached a controversial agreement with Rwanda to cooperate on migration and asylum issues in what could be the first step towards the African country hosting a refugee reception centre for Denmark.

For the last decade, individual EU member states have tried to negotiate readmission agreements with African countries to take back so-called ‘irregular migrants’ and rejected asylum seekers as part of European border externalization to southern states. However, not all African countries have been equally willing to cooperate on this contentious issue. 

In this new article in published Geopolitics, Senior Researcher, Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, explores how in the context of Mali, readmissions have been a bone of contentious in EU–Malian relations. Based on fieldwork among Malian state officials, migrant associations and EU staff in Bamako, the article shows how Malian state officials receive, negotiate, and subtly resist European technologies and rationalities of border externalisation.

The focus on Malian state actors’ everyday practices of borderwork in the grey zone reveals how they enact a ‘double jeu’ through which they manoeuvre between dependency on the EU partnerships and their population’s desire for mobility. Furthermore, it shows how working in the ‘grey zone’, in turn, provides opportunities for EU staff to slip through contentious readmission agreements – under the radar.

The article, thus, sheds light on how - despite the unequal power relations shaping the EU’s borderwork in Mali - the often-underestimated agency of state actors works through how they act, perform, and receive aid and assets to co-constitute their own sovereignty. The article thereby adds to the growing understanding of the concept of sovereignty by including more subtle and less direct forms of everyday resistance than hitherto described.

The article is part of the Geopolitics special issue: Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands coming out in 2021, edited by Hans Lucht, Signe Cold-Ravnkilde and Ida Marie Savio Vammen from the Borderwork project at DIIS.

The collection of articles brings together leading scholars with unique empirical insights across different disciplines to shed new light on emerging borderwork struggles and states of constrained existence in the shadow of EU border externalization – and the local pushback they generate on the African continent.