Expanding Boundaries

Borders, Mobilities and the Future of Europe-Africa Relations

Jussi P. Laine, Inocent Moyo, Christopher Changwe Nshimbi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367539221
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000318180
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book challenges the common European notions about African migration to Europe and offers a holistic understanding of the current situation in Africa. It advocates a need to rethink Africa-Europe relations and view migration and borders as a resource rather than sources of a crisis.

Migrant movement from Africa is often misunderstood and misrepresented as invasion caused by displacement due to poverty, violent conflict and environmental stress. To control this movement and preserve national identities, the EU and its various member states resort to closing borders as a way of reinforcing their migration policies. This book aims to dismantle this stereotypical view of migration from Africa by sharing cutting-edge research from the leading scholars in Africa and Europe. It refutes the flawed narratives that position Africa as a threat to the European societies, their economies and security, and encourages a nuanced understanding of the root causes as well as the socioeconomic factors that guide the migrants' decision-making. With chapters written in a concise style, this book brings together the migration and border studies in an innovative way to delve into the broader societal impacts of both. It also serves to de-silence the African voices in order to offer fresh insights on African migration – a discourse dominated hitherto by the European perspective.

This book constitutes a valuable resource for research scholars and students of Border Studies, Migration Studies, Conflict and Security Studies, and Development Studies seeking specialisation in these areas. Written in an accessible style, it will also appeal to a more general public interested in gaining a fuller perspective on the African reality.

Chapter 13 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Critical perspectives on border regimes

1Pushing the boundaries forwards

Shifting notes on the implications of European border control externalisation beyond the Sahel region

Calvin Minfegue

The issue of geographical mobility and the challenges it poses is a significant feature of our contemporary condition today (Mbembe, 2020). It is not that the phenomenon is new, but the “terms” in which it appears today and its reception by societies set it on a new trajectory. The latter consists of tension, fear, threat, political and military injunctions, as well as disillusionment, despair, torture, and death (Perocco, 2019; Cuttitta and Last, 2020). Of course, this global trend differs from one area to another and from one country to another, without always removing them from the hegemonic hold (especially the European) of the ways of governing migration.

This is the case with many African countries, including Cameroon. Cameroon is an important country of emigration to Africa and other continents relative to the size of its population, while being a country of immigration for nationals from Central and West Africa. The country is also connected to the global logics that characterise contemporary migration governance. It serves as an interesting site for observing the articulation between the internal migration dynamics of the African states and global migration processes, not necessarily for generalisation but for indicative purposes. Cameroon, which has a long history of migration, now faces some challenges, mainly due to crises on a regional scale. Since the early 2000s, the East Region of Cameroon has hosted many Central Africans fleeing the devastation resulting from the sociopolitical crises that the Central African Republic (CAR) is experiencing. The Boko Haram attacks affecting the northern part (Far North Region) of the country have resulted in an influx of Nigerian refugees and many internally displaced persons. Since 2016, the separatist crisis known as the “Anglophone crisis” has turned the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest Regions into areas where life has slowed down, if not serving to exemplify “empty countries” (pays vides) (Delpla, 2019). This has caused the displacement of many persons moving to other parts of the country and Nigeria. In addition to these endogenous dynamics, the country has not escaped the orbit to which many African states are subject in connection with European migration policy. It is on this last point – that is, how the externalisation of European borders is taking shape and producing multiple effects – that this chapter will focus. It thus intends to contribute to a better understanding of African migration dynamics and their connections with global processes far from the many clichés that simultaneously hinder the possibilities of a more serene relationship between Africa and Europe.

Map 1.1Location of areas of migratory tensions in Cameroon.

I therefore propose to discuss an ambiguous idea: the possibility that European border control externalisation in Africa may have serious effects beyond the Sahel region, which is supposed to be its main front. This process and the mechanisms that support it consist of the acts, practices, and figures by which Europe (in this particular context) extends its borders to the countries of the Sahel region, and subjects them to management and control by third-party countries (Morocco, Niger, or Libya, for example). Like other border systems, this meta-border extends beyond its supposed “formal” boundaries. It has an unexpected impact in countries further south, like Cameroon. European border control externalisation produces effects in Cameroonian territory. It does so through the diffusion of a specific imaginary functioning under the duality of attraction – repulsion and hidden incentives and institutional measures. These effects are multi-scale and seem to take at least two forms. First, they belong to the cooperation modalities between the EU and the Cameroonian state on the one hand, and collaboration between the EU and civil society on the other. Second, they concern individuals by influencing how they define the trajectory of their migration.

To discuss these two aspects at a theoretical level, I have chosen to reinvest the notion of “banality” and all the potential that can be extracted from it by mobilising some of the work of sociologist Jean-Marc Ela and historian (and political scientist) Achille Mbembe. Ela’s banality directs the gaze towards things – hidden situations – often considered insignificant, but which constitute the true encyclopaedia of ordinary social life. Indeed, “by studying ordinary life, the attentive observer finds a host of clues that provide analysis with a vast repertoire for understanding the ‘ways’ of doing things that testify to the creativity of social actors” (Ela, 1999, p. 104, translation by the author). There is an idea that it is sometimes more productive to look at people’s practices to understand how they “capture” or what they do with things that are supposed to be beyond their reach, such as the issue of border control externalisation here. Mbembe’s perspective is useful because it also allows us to see something that reveals banality in dominant processes or orders. Banality is mainly located in situations where the dominant power creates a representational system, or system of meaning. This power (pouvoir) seeks to make it “fully real, turning it into a part of people’s common sense not only by instilling it in the minds of the cibles, or ‘target population’ but also by integrating it into the consciousness of the period” (Mbembe, 1992, p. 3). Power is thus explicitly oriented towards the control of the imagination (Ela, 1999). As far as they are concerned, the “dominated” subjects often demonstrate an ability to play with all the fetishised order that constitutes the dominant dispositif. By trying to impose its domination, the power paradoxically allows others (those who suffer it) to do something else by investing the ordinary in challenging and subverting it. This possibility of doing something else with this powerful order is undoubtedly linked to the fact that all power (and its declinations) must, in order to persist, be part of individuals’ ordinary situations. If this is not the case, it exposes itself to being engraved in the order of the ordinary by (“dominated”) individuals. They thus give meaning to this dominant dynamic and enter into a relationship with it. The effects of such relationships can be instructive for grasping the trajectories of devices referring to an order of power, as is the case with the externalisation of European borders.

To give substance to this reflection, I will combine data from ethnographic surveys conducted in eastern and southern border areas of Cameroon with documentary material providing information about recent trends in the nature of collaboration between the EU, the Cameroonian state, and Cameroonian civil society organisations (CSOs). The discussion will be organised around three main points. The first task will consist of tracking and identifying institutional dynamics, particularly those related to cooperation and collaboration – elements that indicate some considerations for Europe’s positioning (in the Cameroonian context) in terms of migration/border policy. The second task will discuss the idea of creating and disseminating an imaginative incentive in how “externalisation” is recorded, discussed, “appropriated”, and disseminated in specific places in Cameroon. The last task will examine the issue of the trivialisation (“banalisation”) of the externalisation of European borders. It will also address their link to the possible constitution of the counter-geographies of the European migratory order.

Do with them to fix them at home

To gain a broad overview of cooperation between the EU and Cameroon on migration, a historical review of public action in this sector is necessary. This point will be followed by a discussion of the contemporary development of the migration and co-development nexus (and the role of the EU) and the place that is given to civil society in this cooperative framework.

The evolution of public action on migration in Cameroon

Historically, Cameroon’s migration policy was based on the intersection of three cognitive cues. These are the idea of national preference, the challenge of regional and continental solidarity, and the connection with international concerns. As early as the 1960s, govern the mobility consisted, for the young Cameroonian state, of ensuring the protection of national subjects and the integrity of the national territory. In the turbulent context of the 1960s and early 1970s, this issue of national preference took on a security dimension. The struggle against the nationalists of the “Union des populations du Cameroun” (UPC) party was played out intensely on the migration field and more specifically on the control of (geographical) mobility. The aim was to control the mobility of individuals deemed “subversive” or “nationalist”. The latter sometimes found refuge in British Cameroon (before 1961) and later in Congo – Brazzaville, then under communist rule (Sourna Loumtouang, 2015). National preference also meant protecting the territory from an unstable regional environment. Neighbouring territories such as Chad and the CAR were experiencing conflict. Migration policy was a border policy projected onto the national territory to be controlled and secured. This border policy was projected and concerned bodies – those of individuals deemed subversive, and who in their way constituted a threat to the national ideal. These two dimensions were often combined to give both political and security density to borders.

At the same time, the country has been part of a continental solidarity movement also linked to a pan-Africanist ideology. This regional solidarity has found consistent expression in the country’s migration policy: the reception of refugees since the 1960s, visa exemption agreements with countries such as Mali, contributions to integration efforts (sub-regional and continental). Having been based on a humanitarian activity requiring external resources, this anchoring in regional solidarity has also fostered a growing internationalisation of the migration issue. It has materialised in collaboration with international humanitarian actors: the UNHCR (formally since 1965) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (since 1969), among others. The border was somehow presented as a solidarity and connection mechanism, shaped by what was then migration policy.

The connection with international issues was built in the wake of the Cameroonian state’s commitment to the African scene. It has grown since the 2000s because of two significant changes. The first is regional and geopolitical. It concerns the multiplication of crises around Cameroon. Since 2003, the CAR has been experiencing a political crisis with obvious military effects. The extremist Boko Haram movement’s actions, which had been limited to the northeast of Nigeria, have extended since 2014 to the Lake Chad Basin. These actions now affect Cameroon (particularly the far north region), Niger, and Chad. Cameroon has itself been facing a separatist crisis since 2016, with armed clashes in the Southwest and Northwest Regions (referred to as “Anglophone” areas). These crises and conflicts have had considerable migration effects on Cameroon. At the beginning of 2020, the country was home to 292,787 Central African refugees and 110,627 Nigerian refugees, and it had registered more than 976,773 internally displaced persons (UNHCR, 2020). The care of these displaced, deprived, and vulnerable bodies required resources provided mainly by international actors under the leadership of the UNHCR.

The second change is global, and of a political and geopolitical nature. It has something to do with the growing reconfiguration of public action in Africa (Eboko, 2015). After the glorious years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the “developing” and “strategic” state intervened in every sector, the 1980s saw a retraction of the state. The structural adjustment programmes imposed on states to “improve” their governance were the main motivations for this. Since 2000, the state has returned, but under the supervision of various international actors. The latter intervene in national public action by investing in its cognitive frameworks and operational mechanisms (Eboko, 2015). Sub-national actors, in this case CSOs, are stakeholders in this new configuration. As an international actor, the EU is particularly involved in this collaborative framework in Cameroon. It is especially involved in the popularisation and dissemination at the national level of ways of doing and seeing the migration issue. Let us now focus on this actor and its involvement in Cameroon’s migration policy.

The migration and co-development couple in the light of Cameroon–EU cooperation

Cooperation between Cameroon and the European Union is longstanding. It has focused on specific issues related to the development of the critical sectors of national socioeconomic life: health, education, port and road infrastructure, etc. Beyond these immediate effects, this cooperation can be presented as a political–institutional complex for the dissemination of the neoliberal capitalist order and later for the consolidation of its political counterpart, the nation state. As such, it has articulated economic (commercial and financial cooperation) and political (consolidation of democratic governance) issues.

Cooperation between Cameroon and the EU dates back to 1958 within the broader framework of cooperation between the EU and the countries of the African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States (ACP). It therefore already took shape in the colonial era. It continued, based on the Yaoundé Conventions of 1963 and 1969, and later the Lomé Convention of 1975 and its subsequent Conventions. Although trade and financial issues have always been at the heart of Cameroon–EU cooperation, there was a shift in 1989 concerning the issue of human rights in the Lomé IV Convention. At the turn of the 2000s the issue of migration gradually became part of the cooperation between Cameroon and the EU. Judging by the guidelines of the latest calls for projects for non-state actors, the issue of migration has become a vital issue in this cooperation in the last ten years.

One of the latest examples is the establishment of a European Trust Fund in 2015 to deal specifically with migration issues. This fund involves Cameroon¹ and is called “Fonds fiduciaire d’urgence en faveur de la stabilité et de la lutte contre les causes profondes de la migration irrégulière et du phénomène des personnes déplacées en Afrique”. Addressing the issue of migration for the EU has consisted of guiding the government in the fight against illegal migration. The aim was to discourage any desire to leave Cameroon illegally for Europe. Such a stance amounts to making Cameroonian territory a vanguard post on the European border, and not only symbolically. The border thus extends further south in a configuration of meta-border points (corresponding...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Migration and border politics amidst the Europe-Africa relations
• Part I Critical perspectives on border regimes
• Part II Political transnationalism and policy impact
• Part III Alternative framings for Europe-Africa relations
• Closing remarks: Expanding the boundaries of Euro–Africa relations
• Index