Short Abstract

This panel explores deportation in Africa, moving beyond removal as a singular event. It examines deportability, the infrastructures and afterlives of expulsion, and how deportation reshapes mobility, belonging and citizenship within and across African states

Long Abstract

Deportation is often treated as a singular event: the legal or administrative act through which a state removes irregularised non-citizens. Like a prism splits light into a spectrum, a closer examination reveals multiple processes, temporalities and experiences of fast and slow violence occurring across, but also within borders. This panel brings into conversation cross-border deportations and pushbacks with inter-state expulsions of unwanted groups of citizens.

We invite ethnographic, historical and theoretical contributions that centre African experiences and scholarship in debates on deportation and connect expulsion to forms of (im)mobility across the continent. We particularly welcome papers engaging with:

Infrastructures and geopolitics of expulsion: How do changing geopolitical relations, colonial legacies and third-country arrangements, including emerging visions of “return hubs” shape deportation infrastructures and logistics of removal? We welcome work on deportation and rehabilitation industries, and on the effects of everyday production of disposability, deportability, and illegality.

Temporalities and afterlives of deportation: How might deportation be understood as a process rather than an endpoint? We invite work on detention, waiting and uncertainty, as well as on return, and onward (im)mobility. How do emotions such as fear, shame, hope and anger circulate through deportation regimes, and how do they reshape experiences of belonging and citizenship?

Internal Deportation: What becomes visible when deportation is examined within state boundaries? We welcome work on internal expulsions, dispersal tactics, the loss of state protection, and forms of deportability at home. What does this reveal about sovereignty, citizenship and the boundaries of belonging?

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