Translating EUrope’s Return Migration Regime to The Gambia: The Incorporation of Local CSOs

Abstract

The end of a long-standing autocratic regime in The Gambia renewed EUrope's geopolitical interest in the externalisation of (return) migration management to the West African country. Since 2017, EUrope has financed several programmes implemented by a combination of international and local actors. Analysing original qualitative data through the lens of the sociology of translation (SoT) offered by actor-network theory (ANT), this paper explores the incorporation of locally owned civil society organisations (CSOs) within the socio-material network of externalisation. As such, it engages with the understudied perspective of Southern implementers in the context of migration management. In our analysis, we put central two notions of SoT: interessement and enrolment. With the first, we show how the development and migrant-protection interests of locally owned CSOs are brought in alignment with the EUropean objective of curtailing irregular migration. This process of interessement is never complete, but leaves room for excess positions, which here correspond to the locally owned CSOs' criticism of EUrope's appropriation of Gambian natural resources, practical organisation of migration management and excessive immobilisation of Gambians. The notion of enrolment refers to the processes of negotiation addressing part of these excess positions. Even with enrolment being successful, locally owned CSOs keep imagining, and to some extent, performing alternative ways of dealing with migration. Such alternative thinking and practicing will overtake the EUropean only if multiple and stable connections arise around it. Our ANT-driven analysis demonstrates that local implementers endorse EUropean migration management because they broadly see it as beneficial; yet, with their criticism, requests and imagination, manage to limitedly alter it, and may, potentially, transform it.

The moral economy of voice within IOM’s awareness-raising industry: Gambian returnees and Migrants as Messengers

“…However, the 2016 elections marked the demise of Jammeh's regime and the installation of a democratic government led by Barrow, bringing The Gambia back to the forefront of the outsourcing of the EU border (Nzally 2018;Gaibazzi 2020). This outsourcing has relied heavily on the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), with IOM, international development agencies and CSOs implementing several projects in the areas of border management, development, and return and reintegration (Cham and Adam 2021;Aucoin 2022;Marino, Schapendonk, and Lietaert 2022b). MaM is among these projects.…”

“…These mechanisms played out in IOM's attitude towards, this time, an independent group made up of returnees. In The Gambia and elsewhere, peer-to-peer sensitisation actually started being performed in partnership with returnee groups and then shifted to the individual engagement of single 'volunteers' with MaM (Vammen 2021;Marino, Schapendonk, and Lietaert 2022b). This point is not trivial; yet, existing literature often addresses returnee involvement in sensitisation in general terms, either failing to specify whether engagement is singular or collective or not exploring this specification analytically.…”

“…Indeed, IOM renders the returnees free to use the phone as they best see fit, as long as they produce extra material for MaM. Acting in their independent capacity, from which they give each other support as well as obtain access to partnerships with non-governmental actors beyond IOM and MaM (Marino, Schapendonk, and Lietaert 2022b), the returnees finally pulled out of the smartphone deal when IOM showed unwilling to meet what they felt was their entitlement.…”

The enforcement infrastructure of public information campaigns: Australia’s No Way campaign, colonial logics, and the production of value

“…As I suggest above, the actors, networks, and relationships that facilitate international migration have been characterized in many ways: migration ‘management’ underscores the governance systems that regulate migration, including the humanitarian organizations that attend to migration crises (Ashutosh and Mountz, 2011; Casas-Cortes et al., 2015; Fluri, 2023); whereas the focus on migrant agency has championed migrant decision-making within systems of constraints (see special issue introduced by Deshingkar, 2019). Some geographers use the term “migration regime” to describe the multi-national spaces through which migrants travel, the variability to which migration governance is institutionalized, and the active agency of migrants on the move (Botterill and Burrell, 2019; Marino et al., 2023; Schwarz, 2020).…”

“…and the active agency of migrants on the move (Botterill and Burrell, 2019;Marino et al, 2023;Schwarz, 2020). Meanwhile, these terms can be juxtaposed with how border enforcement is similarly characterized: externalization refers to the management of borders beyond the territorial bounds of the nation-state (Van Dessel, 2021;Watkins, 2017) and the border enforcement 'industry' focuses on how enforcement at and beyond the territorial border is often performed by for-profit entities.…”