Containment and the Specter of African Mobility

Abstract:African migrants face unprecedented efforts by European interests to contain their mobility. I detail how increasingly constricting channels of legal migration, the externalization of European borders into North Africa, and a restrictive and oppressive EU asylum system conspire to deprive mobile Africans of free movement not only to and within Europe, but the very moment that they begin moving within their own continent as well. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in West Africa and among West African migrants and asylum seekers in Europe, I argue that these containment efforts do not render African people immobile, but rather subject them to greater danger and exploitation.