L'Espace Politique (Jun 2023)
Les stratégies de gestion des frontières du Niger à l’ère de l’externalisation des politiques migratoires de l’UE : vers des frontières itinérantes ?
Abstract
This Article analyses Niger’s border management practices in the wake of the 2015 Valletta Euro-African Summit. The externalization of European border control in the Sahara-Sahel band is not a straight-forward transfer of strategies or technologies from the North to the South. It has launched a far-reaching transformation of Niger’s borders, both in their form and in their function. To make these arguments, the article relies on a triangulated methodological approach mixing the analysis of the official documentation ( program sheets, terms of reference (TOR), project evaluation reports etc.); personals and direct observations in the field, and semi-structured interviews with a range of national and international stakeholders involved in the fight against irregular migration and border management in Niger. Accordingly, the article highlights the setting in motion of an unprecedented and multi-faceted bordering of Niger’s territory and argues that it is being implemented according to five distinct but complementary strategies to spread border practices across the territory. These strategies consist of: 1) strengthening the traditional functions of the border as a filter and edge of the nation-state; 2) stretching border practices inland through the multiplication of police checkpoints; 3) creating mobile border control devices to alleviate the limited presence of the state in remote areas; 4) engaging border communities in border management; and 5) using the latest technology for Border Management Information Systems (BMIS). The article introduces the concept of “itinerant borders” to illustrate the way by which Niger’s borders are currently envisioned, conceived and deployed. Our analysis findings suggest thinking of them today as an aggregate of mobile and flexible devices which can be deployed at different scales, in a dynamic that goes from the line to the trace, with the aim of controlling suspicious bodies in movement. Finally, the article argues that in Niger, it is not the borders that shape mobilities; rather, it is the mobilities of “some” unwanted “elsewhere” that shape them.
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