Short Abstract

The panel places intra-African migration at the centre of inquiry, using a multidisciplinary approach to examine how mobility is governed, facilitated and contested, and how free movement, labour migration and forced displacement expose gaps between legal frameworks and practice.

Long Abstract

Public and scholarly debates on African migration remain disproportionately anchored to a “Europe-bound” paradigm, obscuring the fact that most migration on the continent is intra-African. Moving beyond this Eurocentric lens, however, should not produce an equally reductive counter-narrative of frictionless, fraternal mobility rooted in pan-African solidarity. Ideals of unity and hospitality coexist uneasily with xenophobic violence, exclusionary citizenship regimes and securitised borders. Intra-African migration is therefore best understood as a contested field in which legal regimes, economic interdependence, historical trajectories and social hierarchies intersect.

The panel invites critical and empirical contributions addressing the multiple dimensions of intra-continental migration: regional legal frameworks and lived experiences of free movement, integration and migration control; bilateral and multilateral policies shaping labour migration and diaspora politics; migration flows, remittances and their political economy; the historical and postcolonial roots of contemporary mobility regimes; social and ethnic dynamics of belonging, exclusion and xenophobia; and regional legal and institutional frameworks addressing forced displacement.

These entry points are united by an emphasis on how mobility is enacted and governed in practice and in specific sites: through state bureaucracies and private actors, within local and regional courts, and by communities and mobile individuals that shape and contest these processes. The panel welcomes diverse methodological and disciplinary approaches across law, political and social sciences, anthropology and African studies, grounded in evidence-based, non-romanticised engagement with intra-African mobility. It welcomes analyses of emerging opportunities and innovations alongside critical attention to governance failures and exclusionary practices.

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