Embracing complexity in ‘Southern’ migration governance

ABSTRACT

This special issue argues for a more complex understanding of migration policy ‘beyond Fortress Europe’. It advocates a twofold approach that (1) historicizes the domestic contexts of migration governance across the Middle East, North, West and Central Africa; and (2) unpacks the conflicts, internal contradictions and coalitions within the policy communities in these four regions. In this introduction we outline the empirical and conceptual contributions of the special issue to calls for putting ‘the South’ centre stage in migration studies and to recent work on border externalization in countries of ‘origin’ and ‘transit’. On the one hand, the articles in this special issue analyse how trans/national historical legacies of state formation and mobility politics shape actors’ priorities, discourses and behaviours around migration control until today. At the same time, they delve into the heterogeneity of what is often simply referred to as ‘local authorities’ or ‘domestic civil society’ and highlight the tensions and also unexpected alliances among local, national and international actors participating in migration governance. Hereby, this special issue invites migration scholarship to embrace the complexity of ‘Southern’ contexts and actors to better grasp the power dynamics (re)shaping global migration, its control and resistances to it.

KEYWORDS:

• migration governance
• Global South
• Africa
• Middle East
• migration

INTRODUCTION: A TWOFOLD STRATEGY TO EMBRACE COMPLEXITY IN MIGRATION GOVERNANCE¹

Since the early 1990s, the European Union (EU) and European countries have increased efforts to secure their external borders and contain migration outside of what has been baptized ‘Fortress Europe’ (Boswell, 2003). Policies and projects aimed at controlling migration in countries labelled as ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ demonstrate how the attention of European policymakers has shifted onto the capacity of African and Middle Eastern countries to govern the mobility of both their own nationals and of regional mobility and displacement more generally.

Over the past 30 years, migration scholars have scrutinized this migration externalization – its drivers within the EU, its dynamics in target countries as well as its consequences for migrants on the ground. Research has paid extensive attention to the intervention of European and international actors in local governance dynamics (e.g., Adepoju et al., 2010; Cassarino, 2014; Moretti, 2020; Ostrand & Statham, 2020). Scholarship has also highlighted external incentives for countries to participate in EU migration governance proposals, such as the promise of accession to countries in the EU’s neighbourhood (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2004), or the offer of visa facilitation in exchange for cooperation in other areas (Reslow & Vink, 2015). Such externalist perspectives have contributed substantially to knowledge in this field: as several papers in this special issue demonstrate, donors, external actors and their funds constitute a steady presence in the formation of migration policies in the ‘South’.

However, this focus on externalist perspectives has led to an oversimplified understanding of migration politics beyond ‘Fortress Europe’, with a tendency to view ‘Southern’ states as homogenous; external intervention as straightforward; and resistance as confined to the action of individual human right organizations. Until recently, in-depth analyses of domestic policy dynamics around migration that would zoom into the diverse, historically engrained but often contradictory interests of different state and societal actors at local, national and transnational level in the Middle East, North, West and Central Africa have remained rare.

In line with broader criticism of Euro or Western centrism within the social sciences, however, the recent ‘reflexive turn’ in migration studies has triggered calls for decentring Europe, and ‘recentering the South in studies of migration’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020). In this vein, empirical studies of migration governance across the Middle East and Africa have flourished over the past few years (e.g., Adam et al., 2020; El Qadim, 2015; Geha & Talhouk, 2019; Gisselquist & Tarp, 2019; Mouthaan, 2019; Natter, 2021b; Stock et al., 2019; Tsourapas, 2019; Thiollet, 2015, 2021). Such a decentring approach enables to ‘pluralize’ our understanding of migration governance (Triandafyllidou, 2020): it encompasses an ‘everyday politics’ perspective that considers not only the role of state actors in non-EU countries, but also the perspective of those ‘beyond the policy-making elite’ (Zardo & Wolff, 2021, p. 2; see also Gross-Wyrtzen & Gazzotti, 2021). Yet, as Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2020, p. 7) argues, recentring the South is not a blanket, straightforward strategy that automatically redresses the bias in current migration studies research. In fact, ‘centring can still be characterized by inequalities, and may, in fact, risk perpetuating systems of exclusion.’

Building on two days of intense discussion at a workshop organized in Cambridge in September 2019, this special issue contributes to this emerging conversation. It suggests that a careful recentring agenda can be pursued by privileging a research approach that embraces the complexity of migration governance. This can be attained by adopting two complementary strategies: historicizing ‘Southern contexts’ and unpacking ‘Southern actors’.²

The articles in this special issue of Territory, Politics, Governance cover eight different cases studies – Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa; Niger and the Gambia in West Africa; Cameroon in Central Africa; and Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon in the Middle East – that represent a varied and balanced pool of countries in terms of political situations (e.g., autocracies, democracies, regime change), constellations of migration patterns (e.g., refugee and labour migration, immigration and emigration) and geopolitical characteristics (e.g., degree of proximity to the EU; importance as regional leader). Over the past three decades, these countries have increasingly been targeted by the border externalization policies of the EU and its member states, some (such as Morocco and Turkey) earlier than others (such as Niger).

Mobilizing a mix of in-depth interviewing, ethnographic fieldwork, as well as discourse and media analysis, the articles dissect how migration governance – both as it is framed in discourses, and when it is performed in practice – unfolds in each of these contexts. The in-depth analyses showcase that European and other external actors are often unable to obtain what they want because externalization does not operate in a vacuum. Externalization intersects with long and situated histories of mobility, state formation and colonial domination (Bakewell, 2008; Gross-Wyrtzen & Gazzotti, 2021; Lemberg-Pedersen, 2019; Mayblin & Turner, 2021), and is confronted with local actors who have agency and strategies of their own, and can accommodate, obstruct or resist the attempts of European countries to project their borders outwards.

In this vein, the articles explore how pressures for border externalization are systematically confronted with the historical legacies, norms, inter-actor constellations, and situated migration patterns of countries and regions on the receiving end of externalization policies. They show how in the Middle East, North, Central and West Africa, colonial experiences, histories of state formation and mobility politics shape actors’ priorities, discourses and behaviours around migration control up to today. At the same time, the articles pay attention to the heterogeneity of policy communities³ in these four regions by closely examining competing strategies but also unexpected alliances – in both discourse and practice – between national bureaucracies, civil society organizations (CSOs) and international actors engaged in migration governance. This showcases that local policy communities are proactive agents who shape migration governance and strategists who leverage migration to gain power in domestic and international policy landscapes. In sum, this twofold approach allows scholars to consider migration politics not just as a result of power dynamics, but as a field where power, legitimacy and sovereignty are actively created and negotiated.

As a collection, the articles bring into dialogue three strands of literature that have independently contributed to a more fine-grained understanding of power dynamics in migration governance, but have remained largely apart from each other: (1) anthropological and sociological research on migration politicization, transnational social movements, social networks and bureaucracies at work (Dini, 2017; Frowd, 2018; Infantino, 2016; Wunderlich, 2012); (2) critical geography and border studies on migration control practices and resistances (Lima, 2013; Moulin & Nyers, 2007; Vives, 2017; Watkins, 2017); as well as (3) international relations and political science research on migration securitization, diplomacy and policymaking (Adamson & Tsourapas, 2020; Ferrié & Alioua, 2017; Hollifield, 2004; İçduygu & Üstübici, 2014; Squire, 2015).

This introduction connects the empirical and conceptual conversations that the articles collectively embark on. It argues that by embracing complexity, scholarship on migration governance can better grasp the power dynamics that (re)shape migration, its control and the various forms of resistance to externalized governance. By discarding a vision that depicts external intervention as straightforward, domestic governments as homogeneous and subservient, and local civil society as co-opted or marginalized, the articles help pave the way to understand migration politics as an area where transnational and local interests conflict and overlap, producing unexpected, and sometimes contradictory, architectures of governance. Crucially, the articles showcase that negotiations and power dynamics on migration do not end at policy formulation or the ‘export’ of the EU’s migration policy abroad: they continue with the everyday manoeuvrings of – to name a few – state officials, street-level bureaucrats, non-governmental organization (NGO) staff, as well as with the individuals designated as ‘potential’, ‘actual’ or ‘transit’ migrants.

The remainder of this article outlines how the papers in this special issue historicize ‘Southern’ contexts and unpack ‘Southern’ actors. In doing so, it first examines some of the reasons why policy actors and migration studies research perpetuate simplistic narrative devices regarding ‘Southern’ migration policy, and the implications this has for obscuring the impact of domestic contexts and actors on migration governance outcomes. It concludes with short reflections on the deeply political nature of migration governance and the problems that arise when researching a highly politicized and securitized field. The critical afterword by Pastore (2022, in this issue) reflects on the political relevance of such debates in migration studies, a field that has too often remained trapped in the same power asymmetries that characterize migration politics and practices across ‘the North’ and ‘the South’.

HISTORICIZING ‘SOUTHERN CONTEXTS’

A first strategy to embrace the complexity of migration governance is to demonstrate how border externalization pressures are confronted with local historical legacies and situated migration patterns. The Middle East, North, West and Central Africa are indeed four distinct regions with different histories and identities: they encompass both former colonies and former empires, and belong to different regional systems of migration,⁴ with very distinct experiences of border control – which, in many contexts, largely predate the European border externalization project (Adepoju, 2009; Bakewell, 2008; Pack, 2019). Yet, the regions also share common features: Many countries have a long history of immigration and emigration that resulted in the creation of large diasporic communities (Berriane et al., 2015; Riccio, 2007; Tsourapas, 2018) and they have all been subject to EU border externalization pressure since at least the early 2000s, and more firmly since the inception of the European ‘migration crisis’ in 2015.

One of the notable effects of this externalization has been the creation of a homogenous discursive frame that constructs the countries under scrutiny into an ahistorical region ‘under surveillance’, one that is largely defined by the common set of European migration control policies it is subjected to. As Collyer (2016, p. 606) has argued, such a ‘rhetoric of commonality’ is needed ‘especially where the ‘region’ is extremely heterogeneous or obviously politically manufactured, in order to demonstrate a degree of homogeneity’. In this process, border externalization policies ‘essentialize’ an area spanning from Rabat, Lagos and Agadez, to Istanbul, Beirut and Amman as a homogenous ensemble of countries of ‘origin’, ‘transit’ and ‘(forced) destination’, hereby flattening the political and social heterogeneity of this geographical area. In short:

territories are  …  reduced to their prevalent migration function or, better, to the migration function that is perceived as most relevant  …  for the political or economic interests of the subject who is producing (and making use of) the narrative (in this case, European institutions). (Pastore, 2019, p. 21)

Power, indeed, does make space.

The papers of this special issue all illustrate how policies designed in one context, and exported to another, do not have a straightforward outcome because they are shaped by strategies of partial compliance and outright resistance of domestic institutions. Indeed, the four regions under scrutiny often have their own local narratives and perceptions of migration, each the product of specific socio-historical legacies and migratory traditions. National and local authorities that are recipients of European externalization operate thus under their own formal strategies, rules and practices, which may expedite or obstruct externalization efforts.

A historical lens on state policy shows that migration governance has often been a political strategizing tool of (newly founded or again independent) states. For example, across West Africa, pan-Africanism drove many states to adopt an explicitly welcoming stance towards regional immigrants in the post-colonial era (Awumbila et al., 2008; Bakewell et al., 2009). However, economic downturns in the 1960s turned mass expulsions of immigrants into a common and large-scale practice of ruling parties in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and ‘immigration countries’ in the region (Adepoju, 1983; Awumbila et al., 2008; Peil, 1971).

The papers in this special issue pay close attention to the genealogy of such shifts in migration governance and discourse. In the case of Cameroon, Minfegue (2022, in this issue) retraces how the narrative of African solidarity and the governments’ historical commitment to pan-Africanism has shaped the interest structure and political discourses around migration in Cameroon, leading to a policy of open borders for regional migration. In a similar vein, the Turkish ruling party AKP initially adopted an open border policy towards Syrian refugees in line with a Neo-Ottoman ideology that saw hospitality towards Syrian refugees as a moral obligation towards fellow Muslims (Aydemir, 2022, in this issue). This initial framing around moral obligation gave way to increasingly exclusionary framings under Erdoğan’s presidential regime since 2018. Aydemir traces this shift to ideological cleavages around domestic political identities– but also to the EU’s influence as Turkey increasingly engaged in legal discussions, preventive measures, and international cooperation on the subject. Meanwhile, Cham and Adam (2021, in this issue) illustrate a shift in how authorities in The Gambia frame migration cooperation – from a post-colonial resistance frame during the Jammeh era, mobilized to reject EU migration cooperation requests on issues around forced readmission, towards a more diversified stance on cooperation with the EU following democratic regime change in 2016.

The contributions in this special issue also highlight how regional foreign policies pursued by individual states determine a set of interests and actor alliances that influence how migration is governed. For instance, in both Turkey and Lebanon, policy positions towards Syrian refugees are crucially shaped by the issue of demographic balance. In Turkey, policy choices on the arrival of (mostly Sunni) Syrian refugees are tied to Turkish political parties’ broader positioning on the Kurdish question within Turkey (Aydemir, 2022, in this issue). In Lebanon, Shia political groups including Hezbollah, who back the Syrian regime with the support of Russia, are in favour of Syrians’ return, while the anti-Assad coalition around Hariri still tries to collaborate with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to uphold humanitarian principles, supported by Western donors and Saudi Arabia (Facon, 2022, in this issue).

Lastly, the articles showcase that the homogeneity implied by European migration policy approaches glosses over different experiences of externalization, and the significance thereof for current cooperation dynamics. In particular, policy communities in countries that have long been the targets of externalization have developed more sophisticated negotiation strategies over time: countries such as Morocco, Tunisia or Senegal, with a longstanding history of engaging with European counterparts on migration, have accumulated experience in bargaining, and developed more sophisticated contestation strategies (Cassarino, 2014; El Qadim, 2015). They are therefore often more successful in advancing their interests compared to countries such as Niger, Chad or Sudan who are negotiation ‘newcomers’ and frequently framed as ‘transit’ states by an array of international actors (Frowd, 2020; Koch et al., 2018; Warin, 2020).

UNPACKING ‘SOUTHERN ACTORS’

A second, complementary strategy to embrace the complexity of migration governance beyond ‘Fortress Europe’ is to highlight the inherent intricacy of policy processes and migration governance architectures – in the North and South alike. Migration studies has had the tendency to depict the migration policy strategies of non-European actors as neat, fixed or two-dimensional, without explaining how actors oscillate between positions and domestic political demands, resulting in tensions and unlikely alliances (Milner, 2009; Natter, 2019); or analyzing how bureaucratic dynamics such as civil servants’ interpersonal networks and staff turnover within ministries shape policy outcomes ‘on the ground’ (Mouthaan, 2019; Ostrand & Statham, 2020).

In particular, the papers in this special issue speak to debates around the ‘complex power-sharing arrangements’ (Panizzon & van Riemsdijk, 2019) that are formed when migration governance is increasingly multi-actored, multilevel and multi-sited (e.g., Bisong, 2019; Fakhoury, 2019). Such multilevel governance dynamics imply that migration is an ‘intermestic’ policy domain par excellence (Adam et al., 2020; Rosenblum, 2004), where decision-making takes place on a spectrum between foreign policy and domestic interests as governments find themselves caught between diverging demands of the citizenry and international partners. In this vein, the papers in this issue explore actors’ shifting positions on migration governance and capture elements of this policy intricacy as they play out across the four regions. They illustrate that while many bureaucratic or civil society actors are in competition with each other to shape migration policy outcomes, overlapping interests can sometimes result in unexpected alliances across state and non-state, or local, national and international actors. For example, Natter (2021a, in this issue) shows that Libyan migrants in Tunisia enjoy exemption from penalties for irregular stay due to Tunisia’s cautious foreign policy approach towards Libya; and that the government’s laissez-faire approach is shared by international actors and civil society, which have so far refrained from politicizing the issue of Libyan immigration to avoid it becoming yet another divisive issue in Tunisian politics.

In contrast, certain migration issues are deliberately politicized by local authorities in order to increase their salience and leverage in negotiations with donors and diplomatic partners. In Morocco, ‘Sub-Saharan immigration’⁵ is mobilized in authorities' discourses as a tool in Moroccan foreign policy towards both European and African partners – regardless of its moderate size (Natter, 2021b). In Jordan and Lebanon, refugee camps and the vulnerabilities of Syrian refugees are constantly kept in the spotlight by local authorities to showcase both the continuous efforts and continuing (financial) needs of Jordanian or Lebanese authorities to assure the care and control of Syrian refugees (Gatter, 2021; Facon, 2022, both in this issue). At the same time, excessive European policy interest in ‘Sub-Saharan immigration’ or ‘Syrian refugees’ also allows local governments to sideline other types of im/mobilities that are seen as problematic for local authorities’ legitimacy and image – at home and abroad. Prominent examples are the continued (irregular) emigration of Moroccan citizens as a response to political dissatisfaction and socio-economic frustration, or the unresolved issues around Palestinian refugee integration in Jordan and Lebanon.

Once enacted, local governments might also instrumentalize migration policies developed in Europe for their own domestic security interests, while paying lip service to European migration control goals. For example, Senegal, Mauritania and Tunisia have been proactive in sourcing international funding for border control technologies under the banner of the fight against irregular migration and terrorism, while mobilizing such funds to expand state capacity and strengthen control over their own populations (Cassarino, 2014; Frowd, 2018). In such cases, migration is instrumentalized as an issue to reach broader policy goals, such as domestic state-building or economic investments and political cooperation in and beyond the region. In contrast, it can also be in the interest of national actors to present certain policies as ‘European’ in order to mobilize popular support against them or to deflect responsibility and criticism – as has been the case in The Gambia with forced return policies (Cham & Adam, 2021, in this issue). Such indirect resistance to externally imposed policies is not limited to policy narratives, but continues or is even strengthened at the level of policy implementation. Ultimately, these complex dynamics between internal and external interests highlight the extent to which domestic actors in countries on the receiving end of externalization policies shape migration governance as well as migration cooperation with stronger counterparts, despite real power asymmetries.

Yet, dialectics between actors do not play out only in a binary way. Indeed, within state governance architectures, responsibility for migration policy is often scattered across ministries and agencies whose mandates and interests substantially differ, and where effective coordination is often not in the interest of the actors concerned. As Natter (2021a, in this issue) shows, interests within the Moroccan or Tunisian bureaucratic apparatus to expand their institutional powers and resources via the migration dossier have effectively hindered smooth cooperation and failed to reduce the incidence of overlapping projects and responsibilities. In this context, policy ad-hocracy – the flexibility, pragmatism and ambiguity characterizing immigration policy – has become a deliberate strategy used by authorities to secure the state’s power over immigration. Conflicts of interest also emerge between the national and local levels, as for instance in Niger where the central government is more readily accepting of international migration deterrence narratives in order to continue attracting international aid, while local authorities openly oppose such measures because they benefit from the local economy around irregular migration (Moretti, 2020).

Non-governmental actors also strive to shape the migration governance agenda in sometimes conflicting ways. In Niger, for example, international and local (human rights and development) NGOs who implement migrant information campaigns on the ground see themselves caught between competing for EU money, and making sense of their engagement in migration deterrence (Van Dessel, 2021, in this issue). Similar dynamics are observed in the case of Cameroon’s growing and increasingly diverse civil society engaged on migration (Minfegue, 2022, in this issue). Finally, migrants themselves have ‘stakes’ in migration policy, but varying levels of access to shape governance. While in some cases, they have a powerful voice through their economic and political influence in remittance-dependent states (such as Morocco; Sahraoui, 2015), in other cases they are subject to the framings by both host states and international actors, as Gatter (2021, in this issue) shows in the case of Syrian refugees in Jordan.

In sum, the multilevel analyses across the papers showcase how local, national and international policy practices on migration coexist, overlap and contradict each other, often as actors strive to make ‘sense’ of the reality ‘out there’ (Weick, 1995; see also Lixi, 2019). Accounting more rigorously and systematically for such policy intricacy is a first promising step towards a more comprehensive understanding of migration governance architectures in the Middle East, North, Central and West Africa.

MOBILIZING THE DEEPLY POLITICAL NATURE OF MIGRATION GOVERNANCE

Unravelling the historicity and intricacies of migration policy dynamics does not only offer insights into the functioning of migration governance; it also constitutes a vantage point to analyse the functioning of ‘the political’ writ large in the countries under scrutiny.

On the one hand, the framing and governance of migration reveals deeper political dynamics such as conflicting state ideologies or political regime transitions. In The Gambia, the politics around forced return from Europe have become a testing ground for the democratization of political life after 2016 for state and non-state actors (Cham & Adam, 2021, in this issue). In Turkey, Syrian immigration became a token in domestic party politics, used by the governing AKP party as an opportunity to advance its Neo-Ottoman state-building project – and subsequently by opposition parties to criticize the ruling party for its perceived failures in refugee governance (Aydemir, 2022, in this issue). Such analyses reveal how migration is a central tool for state actors to create and maintain their sovereignty and legitimacy through conveying a certain image of themselves.

On the other hand, the growing technocratization of migration policy and the role ‘experts’ play in devising and implementing migration ‘management’ across our four regions contributes to a deliberate depoliticization of migration, with the underlying goal of circumventing or channelling potential domestic contestation or polarization. In the case of Syrian refugees governance in Lebanon (Facon, 2022, in this issue), for instance, the international community has followed ‘tactics of technocratic distancing’ to obscure the political nature of its decisions in order to facilitate negotiations with the Lebanese government. More generally, by outsourcing core state functions of migration control (visa applications, border controls) to private or international actors, the accountability of such actions is diffused.

However, such technocratization of migration control is not only driven by external actors and donors, it can also be – purposefully or unintentionally – pursued by local state and civil society actors. Across our case studies, CSOs frequently contribute to the rise of migration 'management' on the ground by engaging, as service providers, in migration integration or deterrence projects. In particular, the perpetual fund-seeking needed to sustain these CSOs financially has led to the proliferation of projects that, if they would succeed (with migrant integration or migrant deterrence), would make future intervention of this sort redundant; a logic that is self-defeating both for the CSOs and for the broader goals they pursue (Van Dessel, 2021; Minfegue, 2022, in this issue).

Ultimately, such analyses of migration de/politicization and instrumentalization reveal the extent to which the arena of migration politics functions as a battleground to renegotiate the legitimacy, sovereignty and respective powers of local, national and international state and societal actors in the Middle East, North, West and Central Africa – and hence has intrinsic value when studying politics and societies in those regions.

CONCLUSIONS: NOTES ON RESEARCHING A SECURITIZED FIELD

We conclude this editorial with a methodological reflection on migration governance research. Taking the intricacy and historicity of migration politics seriously asks for a certain type of long-term, situated research: in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviewing of key stakeholders, the systematic analysis of documents or a combination thereof. All these research strategies, however, are not readily accessible to researchers due to the often politically sensitive nature of migration politics (Müller-Funk, 2021), the politics of risk assessment implemented by universities and funders (Andersson, 2019), as well as the broader political economy of research which privileges certain research institutions and issues (Ahmed, 2012). These challenges have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has deepened the boundaries and inequalities between local and international researchers and posed further obstacles to field research. How can researchers navigate and mitigate the challenges and inequalities characterizing the study of migration governance ‘beyond Fortress Europe’?

As Pastore (2022, in this issue) outlines in his critical afterword to this special issue, the ‘decentring and recentring’ ambition of migration studies requires reflexivity on the hurdles that such an agenda faces both from within and outside academia. The articles in this special issue offer some food for thought on how to start implementing this agenda in practice – namely through historical analysis, systematic exploration of domestic politics, extensive ethnographic research, and the exploration of unspectacular sites of politics.

Connecting the present with the regional past, Minfegue (2022, in this issue) highlights the weight that domestic and regional affairs have played in the definition of Cameroon’s migration policy, thus discarding the dominant externalist perspective that sees EU pressure as the main determinant in migration policymaking in the South. Similarly, Aydemir (2022, in this issue) mobilizes a critical analysis of domestic partisan politics over an entire decade to explain the changes in Turkish migration policy vis-à-vis Syrian refugees. Natter (2021a, in this issue) zooms into the apparent inconsistency in the migration policies implemented by democratizing Tunisia and autocratic Morocco to conceptualize political ambivalence as mode of governance which allows different kinds of regimes to retain discretional power over immigration. Cham and Adam (2021, in this issue) similarly explore how changing regime structures in The Gambia respond differently to EU requests for collaboration on readmission in an attempt to cater to both international donors and electorates. The work of Gatter (2021, in this issue) on the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan demonstrates that extended ethnographic observation can shed light on the ways humanitarian narratives of refugee vulnerability serve to exert control over a dispossessed population, the camp residents. Van Dessel (2021, in this issue) shifts the analysis towards unspectacular sites of politics by exploring the design and implementation of EU-funded migration information campaigns in Niger, illustrating how these directly contribute to risks faced by Sub-Saharan migrants en route to North Africa and Europe, while stigmatizing those who choose to migrate. Finally, Facon (2022, in this issue) analyses the use of aid in the bordering of the Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ in Lebanon as a battleground where Western and Gulf donors try to depoliticize – or politicize – the crisis according to their own regional interests.

Leveraging the methodological creativity and critical awareness needed to research the securitized field of migration, the papers of this special issue advance our understanding of the complexity, historicity and political nature of migration governance architectures across the Middle East, North, Central and West Africa.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors thank all the participants of the workshop ‘Governing Migration Outside ‘Fortress Europe’, which took place in Cambridge, UK, on 16–17 September 2019. The discussions held during the workshop greatly enhanced the quality of the articles that are now part of this special issue. The editors are also grateful to the journal’s editorial team for their support during the publication process.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The workshop on which this special issue is based was funded by the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Centre of African Studies of the University of Cambridge, as well as the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES).

Notes

1 A note on terminology. While we are aware that the term ‘migration governance’ has often a technocratic undertone, and ‘migration control’ leaves out an entire set of policies concerned with the reception and integration of migrants, in this special issue we use ‘migration governance’, ‘migration policy’ and ‘migration control’ interchangeably to capture the set of institutions, regulatory frameworks and practices devised to regulate the movement of foreigners across and within nation-state boundaries.

2 A second note on terminology. Euro-centrism not only shapes the research agenda on migration, it is also engrained in the everyday vocabulary of migration studies. Labels such as ‘country of origin/transit/destination’ or ‘Global North/South’ are reproduced and consumed in policy circles and also in scholarly publications examining – even in a critical guise – human mobility and its control. While we are conscious of the potential problems inherent to the label ‘Southern’ (Haug et al., 2021; Mignolo, 2005), in this special issue we use it not to imply any form of ‘natural’ homogeneity of processes or dynamics across our country cases, but because all countries studied are subject to the similar, homogenizing policy frame of migration externalization and thus benefit from being studied comparatively, as we outline in the second section.

3 A ‘policy community’ is understood to be a community of specialists in a policy area, scattered through and outside of government (Kingdon, 1995).

4 This, of course, does not mean that migration systems connecting these regions did not exist (Brachet et al., 2011). For example, between the sixth century and the early 1900s, a fluid system of circulation linked North Africa to the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, where mobile markets featured as links in this chain of commerce (Walther & Retaillé, 2008, pp. 111–112).

5 A last note on terminology. The term ‘Sub-Saharan’ to qualify countries in West and Central Africa and their citizens migrating to North Africa and Europe has become commonplace in both migration policy and research. This is problematic because it directly draws on (and thus normalizes) racialized terms that objectify both migrants and the countries the EU partners with. The expression ‘Sub-Saharan’, in fact, has a very strong colonial connotation because it replaced the label ‘Afrique noire’ (Black Africa) to refer to formerly colonized countries after the juridical end of colonization. The term ‘Sub-Saharan migrant’ is thus a neo-colonial construction that profiles dark-skinned people as actual or ‘potential’ irregular migrants on their way to Europe (Gazzotti & Hagan, 2021; Tyszler, 2019).