Performing (In)securities in West Africa: Territorial meshing and local participation in cross-border security

Abstract

What does preparing for a border crisis mean in concrete terms? And how are local communities incorporated into a security apparatus that seeks to regulate circulation and protect its borders? These are questions I investigate by analysing the IOM-UN Migration Agency’s border community engagement programme in the Senegalese borderlands. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2019, I examine the various components of the programme. The objective of these territorial meshing practices, ranging from awareness-raising theatre plays, primers and cartoons to a crisis simulation exercise, is to improve cooperation between security forces and communities. In so doing, they foster a border control culture as a distinct mode of governance that shifts the responsibility for securing borders to citizens. At the same time, I argue that the project’s emphasis on “local communities” and their knowledge contrasts with the global standardisation of spaces and temporal logics of preparedness and prevention these exercises are based on. The tension between how these scenarios and crises are envisaged and how they eventually unfold opens up a space for criticism and digression.