Introduction to Forum: (Im)mobilities, Security, and Identities in West Africa Borderlands

Abstract

West African borderlands constitute both real and imagined space for negotiating, or enforcing (im)mobilities and migrant agency. The borders are more than border posts, than policed sites. Insecurity does not originate at the borders but that is where it materializes, including human trafficking, smuggling, drug peddling, and illegal arms transfers. This reality implicates the two opposing extremities—how to reify the power of the state to protect migrants, and at the same time positively control migration, amidst migrants’ attempt to negotiate their destination routes, by legal or illegal means. What layers of contradictions or conflicts manifest at the intersection of migrants’ mobility capital and the state’s exercise of governmobility? We observe that even as the state, being the securitizing actor, re-securitizes migration and shrinks the mobility scape, many new migrant identities emerge and blend into host society. This special collection thus provides deeper insights and interesting perspectives on “mobility-politics”—particularly the relations of power and practices of governing these interrelationships in multiple forms and in different spatiotemporal contexts. The collection reiterates the logic of unevenness of distribution of and access to (im)mobilities, as well as the (re)organization of the “social goods” around different nodes of interconnections, which puts a critical mirror on mobility justice. There are basically six papers in this special collection with interesting perspectives and different shades of analyses that engage current mobility debates and masticate the theoretical, methodological, and empirical contexts of the discourses.