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This volume traces the African ramifications of Europe's southern
border. While the Mediterranean Sea has become the main stage for
the current play and tragedy between European borders and African
migrants, Europe's southern border has also been "offshored" to
Africa, mainly through cooperation agreements with countries of
transit and origin. By bringing into conversation case studies from
different countries and disciplines, this volume seeks to open a
window on the backstage of this externalization of borders. It
casts light on the sites - from consulates to open seas and deserts
- in which Europe's southern border is made and unmade as an
African reality, yielding what the editors call "EurAfrican
borders." It further describes the multiple actors - state agents,
migrants, smugglers, activists, etc. - that variously imagine,
construct, cross or contest these borders, and situates their
encounters within the history of uneven exchanges between Africa
and Europe.
This volume traces the African ramifications of Europe's southern
border. While the Mediterranean Sea has become the main stage for
the current play and tragedy between European borders and African
migrants, Europe's southern border has also been "offshored" to
Africa, mainly through cooperation agreements with countries of
transit and origin. By bringing into conversation case studies from
different countries and disciplines, this volume seeks to open a
window on the backstage of this externalization of borders. It
casts light on the sites - from consulates to open seas and deserts
- in which Europe's southern border is made and unmade as an
African reality, yielding what the editors call "EurAfrican
borders." It further describes the multiple actors - state agents,
migrants, smugglers, activists, etc. - that variously imagine,
construct, cross or contest these borders, and situates their
encounters within the history of uneven exchanges between Africa
and Europe.
Whereas most studies of migration focus on movement, this book
examines the experience of staying put. It looks at young men
living in a Soninke-speaking village in Gambia who, although eager
to travel abroad for money and experience, settle as farmers, heads
of families, businessmen, civic activists, or, alternatively, as
unemployed, demoted youth. Those who stay do so not only because of
financial and legal limitations, but also because of pressures to
maintain family and social bases in the Gambia valley. 'Stayers'
thus enable migrants to migrate, while ensuring the activities and
values attached to rural life are passed on to the future
generations.
Whereas most studies of migration focus on movement, this book
examines the experience of staying put. It looks at young men
living in a Soninke-speaking village in Gambia who, although eager
to travel abroad for money and experience, settle as farmers, heads
of families, businessmen, civic activists, or, alternatively, as
unemployed, demoted youth. Those who stay do so not only because of
financial and legal limitations, but also because of pressures to
maintain family and social bases in the Gambia valley. 'Stayers'
thus enable migrants to migrate, while ensuring the activities and
values attached to rural life are passed on to the future
generations.
The recent containment policies aimed at regulating immigration
flows towards Europe have profoundly altered the dynamics of
migration in Africa. The impact of these policies is apparent in
the redefinitions of the routes, itineraries and actors of
migration. But their effect can also be felt in migrant categories
and identities and in the perceptions of migrants in the societies
through which they transit or the communities which they have left
behind. By placing the problem of border control at the very heart
of the migration issue, the policies aimed at the restriction of
migration flows have changed the meaning and significance of
migration. More than ever before, both migrants and institutions in
charge of border control construe migration mostly around the
challenge of border-crossing. In the Global South, the transit
situation in which would-be border jumpers are retained blurs the
distinction between temporary migration and settlement. This
contributes to change, in various ways, the relationship to
strangers, from renewed forms of solidarities to the reactivation
of latent xenophobic sentiment, whether around the Mediterranean or
en route towards South Africa, the other migration hub on the
continent. The editors of this volume have decided to work on the
notion of "threshold" as an operative concept for addressing the
multiple dimensions of the issue: the discursive and conceptual
frameworks that constitute the backbone of threshold policies
aiming to keep undesirables beyond borders; the constitution of
stopping places, intermediate areas and relay towns, which all
represent threshold spaces that challenge local urban equilibria;
and the experience of liminality, in which individuals caught for a
time between two states (as migrant on the road and as immigrant,
the state to which they aspire), experience the typically ambiguous
situations characteristic of 'threshold people' (Turner). While
ambitioning to innovate theoretically and methodologically, the
volume is above all
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