En Route to Europe?

In the last 30 years the EU has attempted to strengthen its territorial borders through new migration governance practices aiming to curb migration from sub-Saharan Africa. Among such initiatives are EU-funded ‘assisted return’ schemes seeking to increase the number of migrants removed to their country of origin while en route to Europe.

In this new article published in Geopolitics, Senior DIIS Researcher Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde and Almamy Sylla (Universite de Bamako) explore the interlinked processes of deportation from North Africa to Mali and increasing dissatisfaction among deportees ‘assisted’ through EU-funded return and reintegration programmes in Mali.

Through the analytical lens of the ‘anti-politics machine’, the article argues that the attempts to transform European borderwork practices into a ‘softer’ and ‘more humanist’ approach to migration management create new, contested, border zones aiming to obstruct African migrants’ mobility.

The authors show how these new, EU-driven, migration management regimes, which are increasingly disconnected from local politics and mobility practices, spur contestations in Sahelian countries of origin, transit and reception. Thereby, the article provides insights into the unintended effects of how EU return governance is implemented, who it benefits, and who it leaves behind.

The article is part of the Geopolitics special issue: Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands (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.