Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands

This special issue of Geopolitics has been put together at the time of the mass demonstrations sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black US citizens, as well as of acts of symbolic toppling of statues that glorify Europe’s dark colonial past. A slogan in bold bright blue letters on a protest banner at a demonstration in Italy in 2020 stood out and found its way into the media. ‘From the Mediterranean to Minneapolis, under water or under a knee, I can’t breathe’ (Sunderland 2020). It links racialised structural violence in the US with the European anti-migration context by making a clear reference to the European Union and its member states’ silent acceptance of the mass drownings of men, women and children attempting to cross the Mediterranean.¹ In a context where the EU has abandoned maritime rescue missions while funding the Libyan coastguard’s pull-back operations, and where NGO humanitarian search and rescue operations are increasingly criminalised (Lloyd-Damnjanovic 2020) this is particularly topical. However, in this special issue of Geopolitics, we move beyond the spectacular events of mass drownings in the sea and into the EU–African borderlands to unpack the historically-embedded policies and emerging practices that shape and reconfigure the border spectacle. Each in their own way, the contributions examine the negotiations that underpin the current, controversial events and 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. Here, 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.

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 and the subsequent support for contested and fragmented forms of sovereignty shaped by European access to exploit raw materials and labour (Mbembe 2000, 284; Niang 2020, 333). In recent years, Africa has become the scene of a wide range of European interventions with the purpose of restraining sub-Saharan migration to Europe. Since the 1990s Europe has sought to restrict mobility in Africa (Andersson 2014) to curb the spectre of African mass immigration. Culminating with the 2015 EU–Africa Valletta Summit on Migration and the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, Europe’s so-called migration crisis created an unprecedented, accelerated moment of control and confinement.

Securitised border governance has now taken centre stage in Europe’s relations with its southern neighbours, leading not only to increasing externalisation of border control, but also externalisation of violence – the Libya detention centres being a case in point. Shackled by its commitment to humanitarian values, though in a conveniently ahistorical form that seems to ignore the bodies on its doorstep, Europe has outsourced violence to a place beyond legal, moral and public scrutiny. In a reversal of colonial narratives, which are seemingly not as deeply buried as Europe would like to think, migrants and refugees are stopped, detained, returned and brutalised in the name of Europe’s continued prosperity (Andersson and Keen 2019; Lucht 2014). Those who set off into the desert and across the sea, relying on the services of smugglers, travel into new and unknown social worlds where suffering, death and disappearances have become the order of the day. These worlds can be viewed as ‘death worlds’ (Mbembe 2019) or ‘extreme zones’ of profit extraction, where lives in the borderlands are commodified in a predatory (bio)economy that surrounds the production of illegality (Andersson 2018).

This development, which includes both continuity and change, has created new and contested EU–African borderlands that give rise to individual, social and political forms of struggle over mobility or ‘borderwork’ (Rumford 2008). Often the effort to impede movement creates resistance from below to preserve long-held practices and hopes for social and material advancement through which mobility is kept alive. Thus, at a time when safe and legal mobility is being limited and migrants’ rights are severely challenged, how do multiple local and global actors shape, perform and contest borders? How is mobility curbed and how is it kept alive? And what effects do these borderwork practices produce? In addressing these questions, this special explores borderwork as everyday practice to shed new light on the unanticipated and often unpredictable effects of global and local agency.

Borderwork as Everyday Practices

Much recent interdisciplinary scholarship in critical border studies is addressing the expansion of borders into new geographical and policy domains, emphasising how border externalisation is increasingly achieved through hi-tech surveillance technology, data collection and cybersecurity assemblages that, in unexpected ways, reinforce global borders (Frowd 2021; Raineri 2021). Furthermore, since borders are now perceived to be everywhere, it is ‘not only an obstacle which is very difficult to surmount, but it is a place he [the migrant] runs up against repeatedly’ (Balibar 2002, 82). Drawing on this recent ethnographic accounts of African migration to Europe have been occupied with how mobility is shaped in terrains that are increasingly difficult to traverse (Bredeloup and Pliez 2005; Schapendonk and Steel 2014). Earlier work has also demonstrated how migrants increasingly encounter new, hostile forms of migration governance that exclude them from the promises of globalisation (see, for example, Andersson 2014; Jackson 2008; Kleist and Thorsen 2016; Lucht 2012; Papastergiadis 2000; Schielke and Graw 2012; Triulzi and McKenzie 2013; Vammen 2016; Vigh 2009). Specifically, the EU’s externalised migration apparatus has been compared to ‘a state of exception’ (Agamben 2005) in which migrants are dehumanised and deprived of their basic human rights (e.g. De Genova 2013; Levy and Sznaider 2010).

To address this proliferation of borders, the notion of ‘borderwork’ has generated a vast, interdisciplinary body of literature in the last decade, especially within the field of critical border studies (Bialasiewicz 2012; Frowd 2018; Pallister-Wilkins 2016; Rumford 2008; Vaughan-Williams 2008; Vukov and Sheller 2013). While the concept of ‘borderwork’ has a long trajectory, the everyday, experiential dimension of ‘borderwork’ remains understudied (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009, 584; Reeves 2014, 7). Furthermore, subjectivity and local agency often get lost in depictions of how border security governance works within and through invisible and concealed power structures and surveillance assemblages.

To fill this gap in the literature, this special issue draws attention to how agencies work through everyday practices of performing, forming and undermining borders (Raineri 2021). In this vein, borderwork is understood to function as a dual concept: not only used to track the specific systemic practices of states and of organisational actors to construct borders (Frowd 2018); but also to give a distinct analytical perspective on ‘the role of citizens (and non-citizens) in envisioning, constructing, maintaining, and erasing borders’ (Rumford 2008, 2). Put differently, how people engage in borderwork in their everyday practices by actively resisting or moulding border control (Cold-Ravnkilde 2021). Adopting this perspective, the present collection of articles focuses ethnographically on experience in places where ‘particular spatial imaginaries’ are translated into ‘concrete arrangements’ and where the result is often ‘complex, laborious and liable to generate its own new sources of contention’ (Reeves 2014, 8). This includes a focus on the multiple actors that take part in the everyday (re)production of borders, i.e. how smugglers and migrants, as well as state and non-state actors (e.g. militias) opportunistically construct, navigate and facilitate migration and their control under-constrained circumstances at various levels of border intervention (Mengiste 2021). The focus on the performativity of borders requires ‘leaving the armchair and exploring the EU from the point of view of the people actually producing it’ (Adler-Nissen 2016, 87–88).

In different ways, the contributions show how restriction on mobility is not a one-way street, imposed by Europe upon a passive Africa. As Frowd argues, powerful African local and regional actors have their own interests, agendas and incentives to engage in border management as well as to subvert it. They are fully capable of resisting, reversing, or undermining European pressure to control and confine their populations. This special issue seeks to liberate the notion of borders from geographical bias and to explore the sites of struggle where EU border governance encounters multiple global and local political interests and aspirations for mobility that expand borderwork (Frowd 2021). Borderwork does not necessarily imply movement to new or better places. Rather, it denotes a particular form of struggle that is given shape and content by the looming presence of borders. Indeed, borderwork is both productive and constitutive of often highly unpredictable effects (Cold-Ravnkilde and Jakobsen 2020).

The contributions to this special issue illuminate how the EU’s ambition of creating and maintaining an accelerated moment of control and confinement is contested locally. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in diverse and dissimilar places and across very different scales, from North Africa (Algeria, Libya, and Morocco) through West Africa’s Sahel region (Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal) into Ethiopia and Sudan, the articles explore how EU-driven borderwork and the local African responses it generates are interrelated and constitutive of each other. Responding to earlier calls for attention to how restrictions on movement are understood and negotiated locally and what strategies emerge in response, we propose three crosscutting themes that underpin the contributions to this special issue (suggesting investigative routes rather than an exhaustive list): i) expansive logics of border control; ii) temporal effects of borderwork and iii) bioeconomies: extraction and predation in the borderlands. It is actors and practices that co-produce the contemporary EurAfrican border conundrum and, taken together, these three themes address both how border policies are moulded through everyday practices of multiple actors and the unanticipated effects of these practices.

Expansive Logics of Borderwork

The first crosscutting theme addresses how the systemic practices of borderwork are not only geographically expansive but also far-reaching in how they rapidly move into new policy areas, emerging digital fields and life worlds. A geographical expansion of border practices is intrinsic to the idea of externalisation (initiatives to realise extra-territorial border control through countries and organs outside the EU). Such practices produce new spaces as areas of risk that stimulate intensified border security governance (Cold-Ravnkilde and Nissen 2020). Building on extensive fieldwork in Senegal, Mauritania and Niger, in his contribution Philippe Frowd draws on surveillance studies to explore how the push for migration control creates new and expansive policy conglomerates by ‘creeping into’ and, in turn, bringing together different policy areas. By proposing the concept of ‘borderwork creep’ Frowd highlights how, over the last 15 years, border management practices in the Sahel have expanded along three mutually dependent yet analytically differentiable spatial axes: cartographic, policy and digital. Frowd underlines how local and international actors, often in unintended ways, work to expand the borderland and its governability beyond territorial lines.

Paradoxically, however, as Tekalign Ayalew Mengiste’s contribution vividly shows, migrants’ everyday contestations of border policies also create unanticipated spatial effects. The intensification of border security opens alternative, more dangerous routes and novel ways to geographically redirect migrants on to new south–east/south–south pathways. In the context of Ethiopia, where the ΕU has increasingly put pressure on the government to introduce legislative and organisational structures to control clandestine migration, Mengiste shows the creative ways migrants and smugglers adapt to and create new migration infrastructures to facilitate their movement across borders. In exchange for stopping Ethiopian migrants and neighbouring refugees transiting through the country, the EU offers development funds and other forms of financial compensation (as also in other African countries). Yet, rather than putting a hold on irregular migration or facilitating safe and orderly migration as promised, the EU-induced interventions redirect and displace migrant mobility in dynamic ways to the Middle East and southern parts of Africa, and in turn, reconfigure the geographical borderscape.

Meanwhile, what informs the expansive nature of border security control is a logic of pre-emption, which aims to disrupt unspecified, yet proliferating, threats even before they materialise. Not unlike in the war on terror (see Massumi 1996) the logic of pre-emption has come to shape the EU’s anti-migration policy frameworks and practices. In contrast to prevention – a means-to-an-end-logic that applies to well-defined policy fields – pre-emption mobilises logics from other policy domains like counterterrorism and crime control. As Luca Raineri (2021) writes, in the Sahel the understanding of cross-border migration as a transnational security concern has coalesced with the framing of terrorism as a transnational threat thriving in ‘ungoverned borderlands’. Cold-Ravnkilde (2021) also emphasises how the EU has turned to a strategy that informalises readmission agreements with the effect that border control measures ‘creep into’ border police cooperation framed as a means to combat human smuggling and terror networks. In this murky ‘grey zone’ (cf. Feldman 2019) in Mali’s expanding crisis, border control initiatives are increasingly amalgamated with security responses aiming to counter terror. And in North Africa, as Richter shows from her work among young West Africans, Morocco has weaponised migrants and refugees as leverage in the struggle with Europe over political priorities and the transfer of resources.

As the logic of pre-emption creeps into new policy domains, it simultaneously enables extraordinary measures, for governments to declare states of exception, which suspend the normal legal course to enable a continued flow of pre-emptive action. As such, the logic of pre-emption ‘normalises the idea that there are people that can be justifiably expelled from the civic/civil, and increasingly human sphere’ (Niang 2020, 333). As Frowd describes it, the way borders creep into other policy domains is amplified by the emergence of new digital technologies, which allow for data handling and sharing. Creeping into the digital domain, law enforcers look to detect the potential ‘criminal’ movements of migrants. Indeed, the digitalisation of border control and biometric tracking create vast transnational borderscapes that are every bit as signposted as actual physical borders.

This accelerated border surveillance and these security practices easily fit within a Foucauldian conception of power that, through the metaphor of the panopticon and biopolitics, portrays power as invisible and almost impossible to defy. However, as Raineri (2021) reminds us (and a key concern of this special issue), the focus on the novelty of border technologies and analytical frameworks risks overlooking local dynamics and indigenous forms of agency and the actors producing them. The degree and nature of the EU’s approach to (b)ordering are indeed contested by different actors. Moreover, not only migrants and their facilitators attempt to defy borders. As several of the articles in this issue show, local elites and African state actors are equally engaged in pursuing their own agendas and creating room for manoeuvre within the implementation of border interventions. Individual police officers and policymakers perform borderwork by negotiating, bending and circumventing ‘the rules of the game’ as they take decisions, and make mistakes, in their everyday practices of navigating the legal complex of border intervention (Cold-Ravnkilde 2021).

In the politically tense readmission context in Mali, Almamy Sylla and Cold-Ravnkilde’s article explores the ‘anti-politics’ (cf. Ferguson 1994) of deportation from North Africa to the Sahel. The returns are the product of violent expulsions from Algeria and the uncertain and brutal situation in Libya, although they are discursively packaged by the EU and international actors as a humanitarian and voluntary response to help stranded migrants by repatriating them to their home countries. The authors’ contribution underscores how the sensitive issues of return and brutal border violence are shifted out of sight by veiling and depoliticising EU return governance. Furthermore, Sylla and Cold-Ravnkilde convincingly show how recent assisted voluntary return and reintegration programmes clash with local expectations and the ongoing struggle to defy EU-funded, state-driven return programmes. From this perspective, assistance during transit and return cannot alleviate the suffering caused by expulsion. Thereby, the article provides insights into the unintended effects of how EU return governance is implemented, who it benefits, and who it leaves behind.

Indeed, readmission and return are deeply unpopular migration management tools. Although desired and pursued by Europe, they are met with resistance on a political and a diplomatic level by Mali’s state apparatus. As Cold-Ravnkilde (2021) shows, focusing on the often underestimated agency of state bureaucrats, the struggle over readmission agreements can be understood as a struggle over competing forms of sovereign space that are continuously negotiated and ultimately unresolved. Despite the unequal power relations in the EU–Mali liaison, Cold-Ravnkilde illuminates the ‘grey zones’ (Feldman 2019) where Malian state actors co-create, maintain and resist European exporting of border control measures. She highlights the pressure that the Malian state apparatus is under from two opposing sides: civil society organisations stressing the rights of Malian citizens to migrate and framing them as ‘nation builders’, while Europe views Malian migrants as irregular and unwanted immigrants. Navigating these opposed positions – migration as a ‘human right’ and migration as a ‘security threat’ – Cold-Ravnkilde shows that in practice the EU and Mali pushed the contentious question of readmissions under the radar. Blacking out the negotiations officially has allowed readmissions to continue but in small and almost invisible numbers, unlikely to cause public unrest while still accommodating the EU’s minimum demands. It is in this ‘grey zone’ that (at times unexpected) opportunities arise to act, rework and shape borders; situations that, in turn, create the conditions of possibility to enact new forms of sovereignty.

The logic of pre-emption also works at an affective level. As Ida Marie Vammen (2021) shows, EU-driven information campaigns serve to deter future migrants from leaving before they even articulate or materialise their plans. Building her case on information campaigns in Senegal, she shows that in addition to outsourcing border control mechanisms and the strengthening capabilities of security partners, there are ongoing European-driven efforts to reaffirm geographical exclusion through the deployment of emotionally suggestive information to would-be migrant populations and their families. The aim of these campaigns is to create an ‘inner self-regulating border’ that prompts potential migrants to stay at home. The struggle here is for the soul of the African migrant, based on the assumption that the border the migrant installs in him or herself – the conviction that migration to Europe is deadly, dangerous, and ultimately futile – works pre-emptively alongside border fences and police control. These are ways in which border policies, through the logic of pre-emption, expand to areas beyond the purely geographical and the formulation of new policy domains. Indeed, we see how the notion of ‘policy creep’ is tied to how migration control measures are inherently pre-emptive in that they aim to disrupt migrants’ mobility even before they start to move. The idea that border policies expand into the lives and souls of migrants, even before they set off on their journeys, also touches on the second theme pertaining to the temporal effects of borderwork, to which we turn next.

Temporal Effects of Borderwork

If mobility has become the quintessential marker of socioeconomic hierarchies in late modernity (Bauman 1998, 76), and people in the privileged parts of the world can move anywhere they like, anytime they like, we must also direct attention to the way things, people and ideas are slowed down at the other end of the spectrum, where distances grow, obstacles become insurmountable, and the waiting becomes endless.

Centring her analysis on the messy temporalities of waiting migrants and refugees in a derelict house on the run-down outskirts of Tripoli, Marthe Achtnich gives us novel and alarming insights into the everyday lives of African migrants waiting to go to Europe (Achtnich, 2021). In contrast to how waiting has often been described in the literature as an empty, paralytic, non-time, in the fragmented state context of Libya, Achtnich conceptualises waiting as a performed social practice. In such precarious moments of the journey, migrants’ time is not a priori given. It is produced through social relations of care, labour and endurance. A particular form of everyday borderwork practices that include intimate care, maintaining social relations, saving money, or looking for a house. Processes that often entail dangers and dispossession by state and criminal actors, but that in turn work to ensure the reproduction of mobile lives. In this way borderwork takes the form of both material and emotional labour. Achtnich’s rich ethnographic contribution shows migrants’ waiting is not a passive status quo; it is a tactic to navigate the restricted border regimes – a weapon of the weak (Scott 1985) in the highly hierarchised and unequal fight against illegal migration in the violent and chaotic context of state collapse in Libya. Hence borderwork produces temporal effects through practices of waiting, through the usurpation of time and also the reproduction of time.

In Line Richter’s discussion (2021), she shows how migrants are reduced to pawns in a long-running and ambiguous relationship between Morocco and Europe. European concerns over mass migration and an increasing desire for migration control, meet Morocco’s aim to enhance its soft power in West Africa through a more humanitarian and open discourse towards migrants from the region. This gives rise to various competing narratives that migrants must constantly navigate, often while stuck and waiting in places that hold no future. To grasp these ambiguities, Richter identifies the demonisation of ‘the human smuggler’ as a form of European ‘moral borderwork’ that justifies crackdowns on migrant communities, while claiming migrant rights and wellbeing as the official concern. On an everyday level, this means migrants must cope with increased police violence in the name of humanitarian concern for their safety. In more state-like, institutionalised spaces, authorities also exercise power by making people wait, be it through the ‘active usurpation of time’ or through halting, delaying and foot-dragging. This form of negotiation of power is, for instance, part of the everyday tactics of Malian state representatives working in ‘the grey zone’ of European border control initiatives in Mali (Cold-Ravnkilde 2021). Here we see how Malian state actors are, in fact, resisting European border control, not by being overtly against it but often by openly embracing and working within the very logic and assumptions of the border control initiatives only to delay their implementation. Despite publicly acknowledging the urgency of the matter for its donors, in practice the Malian government officials halt and postpone the actual return of their citizens by, for example, delaying the issuing of travel documents, as an instance of everyday resistance characteristic of ‘the art of foot-dragging’.

Bioeconomies: extraction and Predation in the Borderlands

The third crosscutting theme critically addresses how EU-driven borderwork is part of and co-produces the conditions for an extractive and predatory bioeconomy where different actors extract substantial leverage and value from foreign donors, and from migrants themselves (Andersson 2018). The contemporary commodification of African lives in the borderlands rearticulates the trajectories of colonialism and the extraction of value during the enslavement and trade of African men and women. As Mbembe (2019, 4) argues: ‘Similar to the majority of contemporary wars – including the war on terror and diverse forms of occupation – colonial wars were wars of extraction and predation’.

In the contemporary era of border reconfigurations, Andersson urges us to explore the emerging border economies, including the political, moral and financial ‘value’ obtained from the border and, in a larger sense, from the policing of mobile human life itself. Where ‘the former is concerned with strategies of containment in which certain susceptible lives fluctuate between being at risk and being a risk. The latter is concerned with the appropriation of vitality from such susceptible lives’ (Andersson 2018). He argues that the biopolitics of bordering combine in an account of the intricate economies of value extraction and generation that take place. This is a clear dimension of Richter’s discussion of Morocco, where we see the Moroccan state increasingly leveraging West African migrants in negotiations with Europe to attract investments in security, but also in how migration brokers – often stranded migrants themselves – capitalise on their misfortunes and earn a living from giving advice and facilitating other migrants’ journeys north. Migrants go into ‘bizness’, as they call migration brokerage, though often the profits are limited and barely enough to scrape by on, while waiting for another chance to leave.

In her analysis Achtnich (2021) shows that waiting is not solely a lived experience of time but part of a wider migration and mobility bioeconomy in the EU–Africa borderlands. Within the clandestine predatory economy in Libya, a range of state and non-state criminal actors profit from and loot the property and belongings of waiting migrants; while also benefitting from the immaterial, intimate economy of mobility, entailing practices of care, endurance and labour. Here, migrants are struggling to get ready and healthy enough to travel the last leg of their journeys. In the rudimentary, confined and precarious space, the migrants try to recover from the mental and physical scars that the journey so far and chaotic life in Libya have left on their bodies. It is through these intimate economies of mobility (made up of frail, often temporary measures) that migrants negotiate their lives in transit and reproduce the conditions for their own mobility. An intimate form of self-care that forms part of the Libyan bioeconomic value extraction of migrant lives.

Also, drawing on Andersson’s notion of ‘bioeconomy’ (2018), Luca Raineri investigates regional responses to European border interventions in the politically salient Sahel region. He shows how mobility, as a way of living, has become a source of ‘value extraction’ to both local and outside powers in the region. Because resources are few, Sahelian spaces vast, and state capacity limited, EU-driven border control measures are deeply dependent on, and increasingly entangled with local state and non-state actors and their interests. Raineri highlights how value extraction in the Sahelian borderlands targets not the extraordinary zones of exception but the ordinary social lives and habitual mobility practices, where the influence of sovereign power on the everyday is shallow and often informal. In other words, the main source of value extraction is not so much of the bare life of migrants apprehended in exceptional circumstances, but the opposite: the social everyday interactions across the border that characterise the way of living of Sahelian borderlands.

Finally, Vammen’s article links to the way extraction of value from migrants’ lives and emotions is used to deter future migrants from travelling. In this case, a range of international actors, such as the International Organization for Migration, perceive the experience of failed migrants as a valuable resource because it can prevent ‘potential migrants’ from leaving Senegal. Thereby, the migrants’ embodied experience of high-risk migration becomes, after return, part of the reconfigured bioeconomy surrounding migration. Although migrants can extract a minimum of value from their own stories, the larger border management complex in conjunction with international organisations and humanitarian actors profit most from them. This is similar to how colonial violence worked to capture the force of desire of the subjugated and channel it into unproductive investment while blocking their desire to live (Mbembe 2019, 5).

Conclusion

In conclusion, with these three crosscutting themes in mind, this special issue demonstrates how EU-driven border interventions impact on African state practices and local communities, and how they shape local responses. The contributions strive to unpack the EU–Africa borderlands as sites of struggle between local agents of mobility and European-funded border control agents and security actors responding to European political concerns; as well as the effects that such border struggles produce. On a geopolitical level, the European interventions that this special issue draws attention to are part of an ongoing global struggle, with deep colonial connotations, to regulate human mobility. Because migrants and brokers are increasingly up against the constructed and historically embedded geopolitical order that frames them as unwanted subjects, the journey is not only a geographical and physical transgression. It is also an iconoclasm in the sense that migrant journeys shatter Europe’s desired spatial organisation and hierarchy and give hope that it is possible to practice the unthinkable (Lucht 2016, 158). When a migrant dreams of a different world, a better life economically, socially and existentially, he or she is not just up against the limits of individual power but up against a global political economy that demands poor people stay put in the places where they happen to have been born.

Shedding light on the local reception and impacts of EU border interventions, the conjunction of articles in this issue challenges Europe’s inconsistent self-understanding as a global proponent of a rules-based international order and humanism, while at the same time silently accepting the violence and destabilising effects that the anti-migration interventions co-produce and escalate in the expanded borderlands. Migrant death and suffering, a now perpetual spectacle, is viewed as an unfortunate but necessary evil in the maintenance of European safety and prosperity.

Furthermore, the ethnographic richness of the contributions to this special issue calls for future research that also analytically decentres European and international actors’ agency by starting from the ground. By taking a point of departure in how local forms of agency come into play in local ‘bordering, debordering and re-bordering processes’ (Raineri 2021, 2) we can unpack how they interweave with domestic, transnational and global processes. In this way, despite the deep power asymmetry and vast inequalities between Europe and Africa, the agency, reflexivity and experiences of African national state actors and elites, local non-state actors and interest groups as well as smugglers and migrants themselves have become central players in understanding contemporary border externalisation dynamics in Africa. The decentralised gaze also makes for a more nuanced understanding of borderwork in Africa, where state sovereignty is mediated and contested through local, everyday actions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities [8018-00127B].

Notes

1. IOM’s Missing Migrant project (IOM 2020) estimates that since 2014 more than 20,000 migrants have lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea: https://www.iom.int/news/shipwreck-coast-libya-pushes-migrant-deaths-mediterranean-past−20000-mark