Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the Senegalese concept of the elsewhere – Kaw – as it is used by young men with migratory aspirations to express their imaginaries of the ‘Global North’.

Paper long abstract:

In Pikine, an urban area within the Dakar region of Senegal, many young men perceive their local life as a besetting reality of bleak possibilities to lead any kind of meaningful life, and the imagined 'Global North' as a compelling story of the reverse of what characterises the local. Using the term Kaw, literally meaning 'on top', they characterize Europe and North America as a more advanced and developed entity and as the all-in-one solution for most of their current problems. "That's Europe!" is often heard in conversations about this seeming paradise. References to the difficult labour market in Europe and the many suffering migrants were usually dismissed with an incredulous shake of the head by these youth. This paper, based on eleven months of ethnographic research in Pikine between 2011 and 2013, sheds light on imaginaries and rumours of international migration by young men with migratory aspirations. The research opens up a wider perspective on migration which looks beyond nar-row economic constraints. The case study of Pikine illustrates how young men construct a "unilinear, teleological narrative" (Bordonaro 2009: 134) in which Pikine is at the bottom end of a (linear) scale of development and the 'Global North' at the top. Thereby they position themselves in a state of non-movement and non-development at the margins of a globalised world, disconnected from the other parts of this world, creating a 'self-peripheralising mental-ity'.