The paper explores the critique of sovereignty as mobility control, developed in West African migration movements in Europe since the 1990s.
Paper long abstract:
The appropriation of the legitimate means of mobility has become naturalised as a key attribute of modern stateness (Torpey 2000; Mongia 2018). In the 1990s West African migrants organising in France and Germany developed a radical critique of the coloniality of the European border regime. Their critique of territorial sovereignty as mobility control exposed the asymmetrical, racialised appropriation of mobility by Western European states in connection with broader processes of dispossession and accumulation. Drawing from the long historical memory of West Africa's relations with Western Europe, West African migration struggles continue today mobilising this critique. This paper re-reads documents of the 1990s movements in combination with insights from fieldwork and activism I did in Germany with West African migrants 2016-2019. I show first how the West African perspective questions the Eurocentric "methodological statism" (Mongia 2018) and "Westphalian imaginary" (Grovogui 2002) of migration research and border ethnographies. Secondly, and more broadly, it proposes a program for transnational solidarity going beyond migration justice.