“Safe Legal Pathways” or New Colonial Frontiers? A Critical Analysis of European Intervention in the Sahel and the Creation of Anomalous Legal Zones

Abstract This article critiques the increasingly popular concept of the “safe legal pathway” in refugee politics, policy and law, using European engagement and intervention in the Sahel as its primary case study. It draws upon neo-colonial studies, necropolitics, border studies and the legal literature on sovereignty and extraterritoriality to explore the function, structure, and import of the “safe legal pathway”, and its compatibility with contemporary understandings of international legal history and argumentation. Divided into four sections, the article focuses on the drivers behind Europe’s migration-development-security objectives in the Sahelout of which the pathways discourse emerges, the EU’s concomitant insistence on criminalising the illusive “people smuggling business model”, and the role which the traditional tropes of sovereignty, territory, and civilisation play in determining policy parameters. Noting the multidirectional nature and multifunctional purposes of pathways, and focusing on the policing of migrant communities both within and outside Europe, this article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of the nature, structure, function, and regulation of the pathway, its susceptibility to being leveraged for the commodification, extraction, discipline and transformation of non-European bodies and narratives, and its place in the creation of differentiated, suspended, and anomalous legal zones for the transfer and manipulation of global norms.