Border Externalization Sideways: African Agency and the Everyday Politics of Mobility

Abstract

European border policies are often analysed through the actions of states or the experiences of people on the move at the border. This lecture shifts the perspective to the everyday lives of Senegalese communities living with the effects of border externalization. Drawing on ethnographic research in Senegal, it explores how migrants, returnees, families, women’s associations, and civil society organizations engage with, negotiate, and contest migration governance. Rather than treating border externalization as something that happens only at Europe's borders, the lecture shows how it travels through villages, fishing communities, households, and social relationships, influencing aspirations, migration journeys, deportation experiences, practices of care, and political activism. Moving beyond state-centric understandings of border externalization, it highlights how migration policies shape everyday social relations, livelihoods, and forms of political action far beyond Europe's territorial borders. In doing so, and by centering African actors and their diverse experiences of (im)mobility, the lecture challenges portrayals of Africans as passive recipients of European migration policies and highlights the many ways in which people navigate, resist, and reimagine mobility in an increasingly unequal world. Border externalization is then revealed not as a one-directional process imposed from above, but as a dynamic field of negotiation continuously shaped by local agency, social relations, and political contestation.