This article explores an increasingly significant trend in crime and mobility control that has received scant criminological attention: border externalization, specifically scrutinizing land border security-building by international actors in West Africa. Going beyond the usual focus on migration in border studies, it develops a criminologically grounded theorization of the border as a political technology of crime control and its relationship to the state. This is done by arguing that borders, theorized as ‘penal transplants’ embodying specific (western) visions of state, political power, social control/order and territoriality, are transformed and often distorted when performed in ‘heterarchical’ contexts in the global South. Further, empirically based concepts from ‘the periphery’ are suggested to enrich border criminology, broadening its geographical scope and spatial awareness.

No abstract

This article explores the incremental role of criminalization and crime control in European Union (EU) foreign policy and external action. Protecting Europe from dangerous or unwanted mobility has come to drive the EU’s relations with Africa. Consequently, the EU’s liberal state-building agenda (promoting peace, democracy and human rights) seems to be increasingly accompanied or even sometimes supplanted by illiberal practices (criminalization, policing, surveillance, border security and militarization). Based on fieldwork in Niger, Mali and Senegal, the article investigates how West African countries’ internal security apparatuses and borders are increasingly becoming a main target sector for European assistance. Yet scrutinizing policy implementation reveals that some European crime definitions and control models are locally resisted and contribute to greater insecurity by upsetting fragile micro-political stability. As such, the article problematizes the compatibility of European and African security, and argues for a collaborative engagement between Criminology and International Relations (IR) in analysing the EU’s emerging global crime-fighting role.

The article explores the relevance of neo-colonial theory for criminology, and its contribution to understanding why and how penal policy and models travel from the global North to the global South. An empirical example is employed to review arguments for and against ‘penal neo-colonialism’ and to tease out the theory’s strengths and limitations; namely the European Union’s ‘penal aid’ to shape West African countries’ penal policies and practices to stop illicit flows and irregular mobility to Europe. The article further discusses neo-colonial theory’s concepts of agency, power and sovereignty by comparing them to similar poststructuralist perspectives on the ‘contingent sovereignty’ of ‘governance states’. Moreover, by drawing on a theoretical discussion on statehood in African studies, it looks at how the sovereignty of African states has been conceptualized as hollowed out ‘from above’ as well as ‘from below’. In doing so, the article contributes to a recent criminological debate that has problematized the relationship between (travelling) penal power and state sovereignty.

No abstract