The Rippling Effects of European Migration Governance in Africa: A Critical Research Agenda and Analytical Approach

This article advances the concept of “rippling effects” as an analytical approach in research on European migration governance in Africa. By adopting a targeted reflexive lens, it adds a conceptual dimension to critical externalization research—a growing yet fragmented field of inquiry that foregrounds Afrocentric, historized, and grounded perspectives. The article examines the far-reaching implications of European externalization interventions in Africa through a review of recent literature and shows how European migration governance extends across new territories and policy domains, engaging stakeholders across scales and fields. These interventions generate effects that reach well beyond their immediate and intended policy outcomes, particularly as they intersect with African actors and realities that simultaneously shape and resist them. By conceptualizing such implications as rippling effects, the article captures the multiscalar, often less visible, and potentially cumulative implications of migration governance, and moves externalization policy assessment beyond the binary of success or failure. Instead, the article offers an analytical approach that captures how interventions trigger local as well as broader political and societal transformations. As an introduction to the Special Issue, The Rippling Effects of European Migration Governance in Africa, we present the articles included in the collection and situate the research discourse on externalization within the increasing securitization of European migration governance, and its intersections with emerging shifts in current African geopolitics.