Full Description
This book delves beyond the spectacular images of African migrants struggling to scale border fences or cross the Mediterranean in unseaworthy rubber dinghies by unpacking the policies and emerging practices that shape contemporary border governance in the expanding EU-African borderlands.
For decades, Africa has been the scene of a wide range of European interventions aimed at restraining irregularised migration to Europe creating an accelerated moment of control and confinement. Today, the externalisation of Europe's borders into Africa encompasses agreements on the return of migrants, securitised border operations and projects under the EU's Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. At a time when safe and legal mobility is limited, and the human, social and political conditions of African migrants are severely challenged, this book emphasises how European efforts are both assisted but also resisted by local actors with agendas of their own. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the different contributions vividly portray how African lives continue to be shaped by Europe's desire to contain and govern human mobility and how dominant spatial geopolitics are contested on various levels.
This book will be of particular value to students and researchers interested in African studies, International Politics, Border Governance, Anthropology, Human Geography and Global Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.
Contents
Introduction: Borderwork in the Expanded EU-African Borderlands 1. Borderwork Creep in West Africa's Sahel 2. Intensifications of Border Governance and Defiant Migration Trajectories in Ethiopia 3. Waiting to Move On: Migration, Borderwork and Mobility Economies in Libya 4. En Route to Europe? The Anti-Politics of Deportation from North Africa to Mali 5. 'When Migrants Become Messengers': Affective Borderwork and Aspiration Management in Senegal 6. Moral Borderwork: Policies, Policing, and Practices of Migrant Smuggling at the EU-Morocco Border 7. Borderwork in the Grey Zone: Everyday Resistance within European Border Control Initiatives in Mali 8. The Bioeconomy of Sahel Borders: Informal Practices of Revenue and Data Extraction Afterword: Alter-Geographies of Everyday Externalisation: Shattering European Attempts at Policing Mobility?
