Migration Control, Violence and Covid 19: (Im)Mobility Regimes in the Borderlands of Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger

Abstract

Abstract

Human (im)mobility is key for the spread and the containment of the Coronavirus, for internal migration and those targeting Europe and for violent attacks against security forces and the civil population in the borderlands of Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger. Therefore, reducing mobility has been and still is the most common approach to fight the pandemic, migration and insurgence. Mobility as a context-specific ensemble of movement, representations of this movement and concrete mobile practices is political. In the proposed study area the current global redefinition of the politics of (im)mobility translates in new modes of border control, government-imposed mobility restrictions and violent responses to these interventions. In this project we will grasp the entanglements of migration control, pandemic related immobilization and violence and the currently changing (im)mobility regimes emerging from and shaping these entanglements in the border triangle of Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso. Our methodological agenda includes to shift the focus on multiple forms, practices of and responses to (im)mobilities and their entanglements. Theses entangled (im)mobilities are our analytical lens to understand specific locally situated social processes that materialize in specific immobilizations, bordering practices and (violent) modes of situated responses. The project pursues a radically relational and reflexive approach, contributing in particular to the two angles spatialities and modalities. We mobilize multiplicity to avoid standard categories and established binaries. Our empirical agenda will provide us with a rich ethnographic grounding of the making and unmaking of (im)mobility multiplicities by specific technical and political interventions. With this project we will not only increase the international visibility of the ACC in Ouagadougou but also strengthen its regional spillover effects.