Paper short abstract:

Seeking to overcome Eurocentric views on border externalization to Africa,the paper proposes the Africanist notion of the frontier to unravel the fluid, fragmented and violent dis/orders emerging in the Euro-African space.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on different ethnographic investigations of the governance of both authorized and unauthorized migration in West Africa, the paper offers a broader reflection on externalization between Europe and Africa. The African continent has become a major site of externalization from Europe, indeed a laboratory in which migration governance is distributed along routes and, increasingly, in wider geographical areas. Debates on externalization are dominated by European, often Eurocentric, policy concerns and analytical perspectives. By contrast, this paper develops an Africanist, or better an Afro-Europeanist, perspective on the Euro-African border zone. Externalization is a complex, contested and often contradictory process, which involves so many actors as logics and scales of regulation. This is a familiar situation, if viewed from the vantage point of postcolonial borders and governance in Africa. The paper therefore seeks to harness the potential of ethnographies of borders in Africa for making sense of the kinds of fluid, fragmented and violent dis/orders emerging in the Euro-African space. It deploys the notion of the "frontier", as adapted from I. Kopytoff's work, in order to depict not only the European fronts of migration governance extending into Africa, but also to analyze the interstices or grey zones between institutionalized orders through which externalization actually operates on the ground. This approach, it is claimed, provides us with a heuristic device for understanding externalization as an emergent field of negotiation and conflict, overcoming a state-centric perspective on border-making, and making room for multiple political cultures, including migrants' own.