This book delves beyond the spectacular images of African migrants struggling to scale border fences or cross the Mediterranean in unseaworthy rubber dinghies by unpacking the policies and emerging practices that shape contemporary border governance in the expanding EU–African borderlands. For decades, Africa has been the scene of a wide range of European interventions aimed at restraining irregularised migration to Europe creating an accelerated moment of control and confinement. Today, the externalisation of Europe’s borders into Africa encompasses agreements on the return of migrants, securitised border operations and projects under the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. At a time when safe and legal mobility is limited, and the human, social and political conditions of African migrants are severely challenged, this book emphasises how European efforts are both assisted but also resisted by local actors with agendas of their own. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the different contributions vividly portray how African lives continue to be shaped by Europe’s desire to contain and govern human mobility and how dominant spatial geopolitics are contested on various levels. This book will be of particular value to students and researchers interested in African studies, International Politics, Border Governance, Anthropology, Human Geography and Global Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

This riveting book chronicles the lives of a group of fishermen from Ghana who took the long and dangerous journey to Southern Italy in search of work in a cutthroat underground economy. A story that illuminates the nature of high-risk migration around the world, "Darkness before Daybreak" reveals the challenges and experiences of these international migrants who, like countless others, are often in the news but are rarely understood. Hans Lucht tells how these men live on the fringes of society in Naples, what the often deadly journey across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea involved, and what their lives in the fishing village of Senya Beraku - where there are no more fish - were like. Asking how these men find meaning in their experiences, Lucht addresses broader existential questions surrounding the lives of economic refugees and their death-defying struggle for a life worth living. He also considers the ramifications of the many deaths that occur in the desert and the sea for those who are left behind.

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This riveting book chronicles the lives of a group of fishermen from Ghana who took the long and dangerous journey to Southern Italy in search of work in a cutthroat underground economy. A story that illuminates the nature of high-risk migration around the world, "Darkness before Daybreak" reveals the challenges and experiences of these international migrants who, like countless others, are often in the news but are rarely understood. Hans Lucht tells how these men live on the fringes of society in Naples, what the often deadly journey across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea involved, and what their lives in the fishing village of Senya Beraku - where there are no more fish - were like. Asking how these men find meaning in their experiences, Lucht addresses broader existential questions surrounding the lives of economic refugees and their death-defying struggle for a life worth living. He also considers the ramifications of the many deaths that occur in the desert and the sea for those who are left behind.