Regional Integration Alongside Securitisation? The Statebuilding Ambitions of ECOWAS States in Migration Cooperation

Abstract

Why have population monitoring, migration control and surveillance become a significant area of common ground in EU-African migration cooperation? This article examines the securitisation of borders in the West Africa region. It finds that state actors in Senegal and Ghana perceive the technocratic solutions that arise from this cooperation as useful in attaining domestic governance and statebuilding goals, and have presented the ECOWAS regional integration agenda and border securitisation project as congruent. This article proposes that the depoliticised nature of security cooperation, alongside specific features of the domestic policymaking contexts, allows the circumvention of domestic critique of securitisation.