The long shadow of the border: Migrants, brokers and European border governance in Africa

In recent years Africa has become the scene of a wide range of European interventions aimed at restraining irregular sub-Saharan migration to Europe creating an accelerated moment of control and confinement. Today, the externalisation of Europe’s borders into Africa encompasses agreements on the return of migrants, securitised border operations, and projects under the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa.

At a time when safe and legal mobility is limited, and the human, social and political conditions of African migrants are severely challenged, the book emphasises how European efforts are both assisted but also resisted, by local actors with agendas of their own. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the different contributions vividly portray how African lives continue to be shaped by Europe’s desire to contain and govern human mobility and how dominant spatial geopolitics are contested on various levels. This book delves beyond the spectacular images of African migrants struggling to scale border fences or cross the Mediterranean in unseaworthy rubber dinghies – and seeks to unpack the policies and emerging practices that are shaping and reconfiguring contemporary border governance in the expanding EU–African borderlands.