The Euro-African Migration, Development, Security Nexus in West Africa: Negotiating Mobility in Mali and Burkina Faso

ended

For about a decade, the EU experiments what it perceives as an unprecedented “migration crisis”. Moreover, since the mid-2000, the US-European agenda has integrated West Africa into the ‘Global War on Terror’ and uses its development cooperation to promote its policy. This migration-development-security nexus became a major political problem, prompting discourses, policies and dispositifs of crisis impacting African mobility. Based on a qualitative, empirical and comprehensive perspective, NEGOMOBI will investigate this nexus via the Malian and the Burkinabe case studies, in a comparative perspective. NEGOMOBI has 3 main objectives. The first one is to conduct a retrospective of the career of this Euro-African nexus as a public problem, through the design of both case studies. This will involve a work of historicization of migration and security policies promoted by Western countries in Mali and Burkina in a postcolonial setting. The second one is to study the actual policy-making process promoting this nexus and the negotiations between the EU and Mali and Burkina Faso on cooperation agreements as an attempt to solve this migration-security crisis. Finally, based on an ethnography of bus stations in Bamako and Ouagadougou, the third objective is to describe the implementation ‘from below’ of this nexus, its effects and counter-effects on West-African mobility, and the tactics and strategies developed by local actors, with a specific focus on gender issues on one hand, and on materiality on the other hand. It examines how border management and controls through technical and technological infrastructure are shaping human experience, masculinity and femininity, mobility and security in bus stations. By following the chains of actors, NEGOMOBI investigates how scales are concretely articulated in the making of a public policy and its implementation, and how this policy contribute to locally (re)produce social and political inequality through its performative effects.