Reversing the gaze: West Africa performing the EU migration-development-security nexus

Deridder, Marie; Pelckmans, Lotte; Ward, Emilia

doi:10.4000/anthropodev.938

Cited by 20 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Those histories do not belong to Mali alone but are also part of its relationship with Libya. Presentist accounts of African migration as a "new phenomenon" or as a "crisis" often overshadow these histories of mobility (Lemberg-Pedersen, 2019;Deridder et al, 2020;Ould Moctar, 2020;Gross-Wyrtzen and Gazzotti, 2021;Gazzotti et al, 2022;Gross-Wyrtzen and El Yacoubi, 2022). When, in contemporary Mali, racial formations change and black returnees make their claims, these historical legacies, situated mobilities and direct, and recent, experiences of racism and xenophobia play crucial roles.…”

Section: At the Intersection Of Conflicts And Racial Histories: Doubl...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Security and migration have been framed as major, and interrelated, political problems, prompting crisis discourses and policies (Bonnecase and Brachet, 2013). This has legitimised restrictive policies merging security, migration, and development policy (Deridder et al, 2020). By promoting a security-centred and restrictive approach to border externalization in third countries, including the Sahelian region, the European Union (EU) is tightening its migration policy in ways that have deadly effects (Brachet, 2018;Stock et al, 2019).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…This article also contributes to the literature that decentres the European continent, focussing analysis, instead, on places usually understood, in a Eurocentric way, as "transit" , "sending" , "partner" or "third" countries. This allows us to investigate those inequalities which are effectively produced, reproduced, confronted and contested in the "Southern" contexts that are facing externalization measures (see also Stock et al, 2019;Deridder et al, 2020;Triandafyllidou, 2020;Gazzotti et al, 2022;Gross-Wyrtzen and El Yacoubi, 2022). This de-centring allows us to pluralize our understanding of migration governance in various "Southern" contexts that possess situated historical, racial, and migratory legacies.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Racialized Impacts of Migration Governance in Mali

Deridder,

Sylla

2024

remi

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Perceptions of Africa as a non-racial space are belied by cases such as Mali. This article explores how racial arguments were deployed by black returnees in Bamako after their repatriation from Libya. Race, racialization processes, and racial violence were one of the cornerstones of French colonization in Mali, and then of the post-colonial state. Mali had a complex relationship with its northern neighbour Libya, for many decades a destination for Malian migrants. The fall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 created new problems, as both black Malian migrant workers and Tuareg ex-combatants were returned to the country. Both experienced, in different ways, the effects of a migration regime, influenced by European Union programmes. This article shows how racial categories and migration politics intersect in Mali, becoming mutually constituent and interrelated, and leaving various actors, institutions, processes, histories, and multiple scales entangled with each other.

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Section: At the Intersection Of Conflicts And Racial Histories: Doubl...mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Racialized Impacts of Migration Governance in Mali

Deridder,

Sylla

2024

remi

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“…Son enquête au sein d'un programme de l'Organisation internationale pour les migrations, mis en oeuvre dans des localités situées sur la frontière sénégalo-mauritanienne, est à la fois une analyse d'un modèle de contrôle des circulations transfrontalières « par les communautés » et une ethnographie de certaines phases de sa propre circulation en tant que « modèle voyageur standardisé » (Olivier de Sardan, 2021). Conformément à la doctrine du nexus migration-sécurité-développement (Deridder et al, 2020), la « porosité » des frontières est perçue par l'agence onusienne et ses partenaires étatiques sahéliens comme un facteur de fragilité face à de multiples menaces (trafics en tout genre, catastrophes, terrorisme). Le programme de l'OIM mêle la matérialisation de la frontière par la création d'infrastructures étatiques et communautaires à des activités de sensibilisation des populations à travers des séances de théâtre, des bandes dessinées et des exercices de simulation de crises de nature diverse.…”

Section: Les Conditions Matérielles Et Immatérielles Des Circulations...unclassified

Circulations matérielles et immatérielles aux Suds : revisiter la « globalisation par le bas »

Blundo

2023

anthropodev

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“…Esto no hace sino confirmar que, después de todo, el homo economicus no deja de ser un mito (Thaler y Sunstein, 2009;Chandler, 2013a). Al pasar de las actividades humanitarias de intervención a la post-intervención -lo cual tiene una serie de implicaciones sobre la capacidad interna del sujeto para "autogobernarse" (Chandler, 2012;Chandler, 2013a)-la migración, el desarrollo y la seguridad se han entrelazado estrechamente, de tal forma que algunos hablan incluso de un nexo migración-desarrollo-seguridad, en el que la ayuda humanitaria ayudaría a lograr una gobernanza global de la complejidad (Stern y Öjendal, 2010;Truong y Gasper, 2011;Deridder et al, 2020). Sin negar su utilidad, este trabajo problematiza esta comprensión de la resiliencia -preocupada por la mejora biopolítica de la capacidad para auto-gobernarse-desentrañando así las diversas formas en que "los procesos de resiliencia están marcados por las desigualdades y por las consecuencias de una historia de colonialidad del poder, opresión y privilegio" (Atallah et al, 2021, p. 9) que se manifiestan cuando estos proyectos se implementan en contextos o sobre cuerpos del Sur Global.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

The racial biopolitics of humanitarianism in Africa: examining European resilience-building in the Sahel and lake Chad Basin

Oyawale,

Corral Corral

2024

Rel. Int.

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This paper examines humanitarianism in the Global South through engaging with resilience projects in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin (LCB). It addresses how recent humanitarianism has moved away from top-down interventions which seek to either intervene to save those that have been rendered “bare life” (Agamben, 1998, p. 4) by their own governments or improve the state’s —especially fragile and failing ones— capacity to govern, towards society-based projects which seek to produce resilient subjects through addressing the broader social milieu. While previous accounts of security and development emphasized why fragile states and authoritarian regimes could constitute a threat to the international system, society or community which thus serves as justification for interventions, sometimes militarily, which such regimes flouted specific international norms and conventions. However, humanitarianism has become less targeted at regime change as was evident with the reluctance that followed the unproductive cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya where assumptions that regime change, or democracy promotion could promote the ends of liberal governance. Moving away from these statist focus, post-intervention has moved towards strengthening the capacities of communities to withstand shocks, but this is merely a pre-requisite for the objectives of the resilience project. My contention is that the move towards resilience is not only an acknowledgement of the cognitive imperfections of the liberal subject but more importantly (Chandler, 2013b), it raises questions —about liberal subjecthood. These imperfections have historically been reserved for non-whites and non-Europeans since the Enlightenment, for example, issues related to (ir-)rationality and (un-)reason; the homo economicus is a myth after all (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009; Chandler, 2013a). By moving away from humanitarian activities that require intervention to post-intervention, which involves claims about the subject’s internal capacity to “self-govern” (Chandler, 2012; Chandler, 2013a), migration, development and security have become closely intertwined with some suggesting a migration-development-security nexus where humanitarian aid serves the purpose of accomplishing global governance of complexity (Stern and Öjendal, 2010; Truong and Gasper, 2011; Deridder et al., 2020). While useful, this paper problematizes this understanding of resilience which concerns itself with the biopolitics of enhancing life’s capacity to self-govern by unpacking the various ways in which “resilience processes are marked by inequities and by the consequences of a history of the coloniality of power, oppression, and privilege” (Atallah et al., 2021, p. 9), which manifest when these projects are implemented within contexts or on bodies from the Global South. In particular, the move towards resilience has entailed further incursions into people’s lives such that various rationalities and techniques of governmentality are directed at the population which may raise further questions when these populations are those of other countries or within regions that have a history of colonisation and subjugation. By reconceptualising biopolitics as a racial biopolitics and by decentring the state and instead looking at assemblages, that is, a multiplicity of actors and rationalities and technologies, and practices which function as totalities and produce passive or active agents with or without capacity for resistance, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of agencement which is translated to English as “Assemblages”, is useful to capture the rationalities and techniques of resilience projects in the Sahel and LCB. I reconceptualise this powerful concept as “racialised assemblages”, made up of a set of “racial components” that produce “racialised ensembles”, that is, a multiplicity of actors and rationalities and technologies, this paper shows how resilience projects by Western state and non-state actors such as the United Kingdom, France and the EU and other humanitarian actors such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the Sahel and the LCB are both exclusionary and raced and how these attempts seek to exploit the historical infantilization of the non-white subject or subjectivity within the Sahel and the LCB. Engaging with some humanitarian activities in the Sahel and LCB, the paper argues that through a racialised and exclusionary racial biopolitics that function through racialised assemblages, European humanitarian aid and assistance through upstreaming border control management through biometrics, exploit and sustain colonialities that seek achieve European outcomes. While projects such as migration and border control in the Niger-Nigeria border through biometric management and development projects that seek to address the root causes of insecurity, underdevelopment and forced displacement are promoted as humanitarian issues and facilitated through development aid, such racialised discourses are a continuation of racist historical depictions associated with whiteness and non-whiteness which made assumptions about humans, the environment, and the relationship between the two. For those who emerged in European discourse as lacking the capacity to transform their environment, Access to full personhood was either denied or delayed which remerges in claims that attempt to interpellate persons and communities in the Sahel as vulnerable, poor, fragile, failing to highlight their deficient resilience and how this could impact on others who have achieved better resilience. For example, the attempts to build resilience through border control and management in the Sahel and LCB through the regularization of some types of desirable movements and criminalisation of irregular movement within the Sahel and LCB, especially where these are viewed as potentially constituting a risk to European security interests. For example, border policing and management posts in Konni-Illela and Eroufa in the Tahoua region of Niger which both seek to manage and control movement across the Niger-Nigeria border are promoted as enhancing Niger’s own border management policy while it was set up through collaborative humanitarian efforts of various actors and was funded by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) of the U.S. Department of State (IOM, 2023). In addition to the other actors, these all constitute racialised biopolitical assemblages which attempt to govern complexity within the African context which is a continuation of various historical colonialities. Finally, in addition to the various infantilizing tendencies of racialised versions of resilience where the subject is viewed as incapable of full self-governance, and self-transformation, these projects when enforced on non-Western contexts such as the Global South perpetuate colonialities and within the Sahel, may stifle other possibilities of non-Western resilience such as those associated with human relationality. It becomes necessary to problematize the various resilience projects, including those that have apparently explicit humanitarian dimensions such as assistance and aid by asking critical questions about what they do which could also expose the ways in which those that are exposed to these rationalities and technologies resist these attempts. Further research should investigate the various ways in which individuals and communities in the Sahel interact with these resilience projects and also how various so-called African partners —state and non- state— who play integral roles in facilitating and implementing them are positioned and how they position themselves. Such research could adopt focus groups, in-depth interviews, or ethnographic methods to capture ways in which these attempts may be reproduced, modified or even resisted by these people that emerge as targets of European post-interventionist biopolitics.

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Reversing the gaze: West Africa performing the EU migration-development-security nexus

Cited by 20 publications

References 67 publications

Racialized Impacts of Migration Governance in Mali

Racialized Impacts of Migration Governance in Mali

Circulations matérielles et immatérielles aux Suds : revisiter la « globalisation par le bas »

The racial biopolitics of humanitarianism in Africa: examining European resilience-building in the Sahel and lake Chad Basin

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