Borderwork Creep in West Africa’s Sahel

Abstract

This article argues that border management practices in the Sahel, strongly driven by European concerns and funding, are reaching into new geographic and policy areas. It introduces the concept of borderwork ‘creep’, to highlight how border management practices have, in the last 15 years, expanded along three axes. This term borrows from debates on ‘function creep’ in surveillance studies which have generally been focused on digital technologies in the global north. The first axis is a cartographic one, with borderwork functioning through a denial of cartographic limits to border security. Borderwork has crept inland, with security practices taking an expansive vision of the borderland and bringing controls to key inland nodes. The second is that of a cross-pollination of policy areas with a growing role for judicialised modes of justification for borderwork. The third relates to faith in technology, with new digital geographies making borderwork in the Sahel reliant on data handling and sharing. To make these arguments, the article draws on fieldwork since 2013 in Senegal, Mauritania, and Niger. By examining the breadth and expansion of borderwork in the Sahel, it contests visions that centre ‘Fortress Europe’ and instead highlights the multiple often overlapping global and local interests that expand borderwork in the Sahel.