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- Convenor:
-
Hugh Lamarque
(The University of Edinburgh)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Politics and International Relations (x) Covid (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S68
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel showcases both empirical and theoretical materials on the causes and consequences of border closures. Although this is a matter of global concern, Africa - the world's most partitioned continent - offers a wealth of material on how and why borders are closed.
Long Abstract:
The closure of international borders is among the most contentious political issues of our time. Although this is a matter of global concern, Africa in particular offers a wealth of untapped material on how and why borders are closed. This panel aims to make significant empirical and theoretical contributions on the subject through a comparative perspective on border closures across the world's most partitioned continent.
Despite a rapidly growing literature on borderlands in Africa, a systematic analytical framework for this kind of event has yet to be developed. This is not surprising. Border closure is a more intangible subject than it may appear. In most cases, the closure is partial, both with regard to the sections of the border affected, and also the sections of society prohibited from crossing it. The rival interests involved mean that events are often poorly documented and publicly disputed.
The surge of closures and reopenings that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic offers a weight of fresh empirical material. Their consequences are ongoing and significant: closures have disrupted regional trade, collapsed survival economies of local traders, divided families, incentivised smuggling, and uprooted refugees. These events predated the virus, and the panel looks beyond public health concerns to other motivations in history. It will also look to the future, as the continent adapts to its recent experiences.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Claire Lefort-Rieu (Centre Population et Développement (CEPED, IRD Université de Paris))
Paper short abstract:
In March 2020, Cameroon closed its border due to Covid-19. An ethnography of the refugee strategies and aid policies and practices in the Eastern region highlights how the pandemic situation reset forced migration management, but also gave refugees the opportunity to (re)affirm their agency.
Paper long abstract:
In March 2020, Cameroon closed its borders because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Doing so, it challenged its official “open-door policy” towards refugees and accentuated a significant shift in humanitarian-security discourses and rationales.
In 2020-2021, we conducted an ethnography of refugee strategies and aid policies and practices in the eastern part of the country, at the border with Central African Republic. Our data highlight how aid actors supported the governmental strategy to ensure the compliance of refugee camps with movement restrictions and quarantine system, justified as necessary responses for both refugees’ and citizens’ safety. Going against the humanitarianization trend of the past decade, these measures enabled Cameroon’s decision makers to redefine existing migration governance, through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime in the long term. In a context of increased border securitization and militarization, the humanitarian rationale and action play a crucial role in enforcing migrant containment.
However these exceptional measures, instead of increasing the side-lining of refugees, gave them the opportunity to subvert the modes of governmentality to which they are subject. Endowed with important know-how (developed over the years spent in refugee camps) but limited power-to-do (granted by the authorities and actors of the host country), refugees deployed mechanisms of transgression that enabled them to curb these processes of containment and marginalization. Their knowledge of the borderland and their ability to cross the borders despite their closure became valuable not only for themselves but also for local Cameroonians.
Kossigari DJOLAR (Université Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne Université de Kara, UMR PRODIG, PREDESS, IRD)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the heuristic scope of the sanitary closure of borders in West Africa, using the case of Togo. It questions the state management practices and the daily functioning of actors at the border through the notions of "official borders" and "popular borders".
Paper long abstract:
The closure of borders was imposed on all countries as one of the spatial containment strategies of COVID-19. Stimulated by the health emergency more than by a real sovereign will to close, this refrontization has been implemented in various ways depending on the national context and has imposed choices for a better allocation and optimal management of available resources. Beyond the operational difficulties, these choices provide information on the representations and practices of borders that are likely to enrich the scientific corpus. How does the pandemic reshape the relationship between the State and its territory? Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine the heuristic scope of the sanitary closure of borders in West Africa, based on the case of Togo, through a six-month ethnographic survey conducted in seven border posts in Togo between September 2020 and March 2021. More specifically, the purpose is to question state management practices and the daily functioning of actors at the border based on the notions of "official borders", which local terminology opposes to "popular borders". These notions reflect a spatial changes of controls and forms of mobility according to the actors' representations of time and space.
Keywords: COVID-19, border, official borders, popular borders, West Africa, Togo