Indirect migration management: Entangled histories of (externalized) repatriation in and beyond the Gambia’s colonial legacy

Abstract

This article challenges Eurocentric and presentist understandings of border externalization from Europe to Africa. It describes how techniques of migration governance concretely reinvent legacies of colonial rule, while also pushing research beyond the colonial frame by heeding the plural histories of migration control that co-constitute border externalization on the ground. The article investigates in particular the Gambian node of a EU-IOM joint initiative aiming to repatriate and reintegrate West African migrants from transit countries along the Mediterranean routes to Europe. Postcolonial dependencies between the Gambia and Europe, together with the post-authoritarian transition in the Gambia since 2017, have allowed the EU-IOM venture to rapidly expand and operate autonomously. At the same time, externalized repatriation depends on and seeks to integrate local state, community and family actors in order to control returnees and prospective migrants. This results in a form of “indirect migration management” that has colonial and postcolonial roots. Powerful organizations such as IOM may exploit societal institutions of mobility and simultaneously conceal or delegitimize them. Speaking of “indirect migration management” thus urges us to study border externalization within a heterogenous landscape of postcolonial governance in Africa, including the alternative histories and geographies of mobility control that become entangled in and through externalized bordering.