Securing Borders in West Africa: Transnational Actors, Practices, and Knowledges

Abstract

This dissertation examines border security practices in West Africa, with emphasis on the effects of practices of international intervention. The dissertation advances an understanding of borders as institutional spaces, eschewing a view of borders as geographical features alone. It leverages this view of borders to examine the everyday practices of border control, focusing in particular on the security professionals who cooperate and compete over the meaning and enactment of border security. The dissertation draws from ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal and Mauritania to advance three case studies. First, it examines Spanish police cooperation with Senegal and Mauritania on the prevention of irregular migration by sea and land routes. Second, it analyzes Mauritania’s construction of new border posts in response to migration and terrorism. Third, it looks into the adoption of biometric identification at airports and in official documents in Senegal and Mauritania. In each of these cases, the dissertation argues, everyday border security practices are framed in terms of capacity, with border control taking on the practical characteristics of statebuilding.

This dissertation makes three key contributions to knowledge. First, by focusing on the quotidian social and technical aspects of borders, it provides a view into the concrete knowledge practices and organizational politics that drive border control, even if they are of complex causality. Second, this dissertation contributes to security studies a theorization of the movement of security practices and understandings between global contexts. Third, by relying on fieldwork in closed and rarely accessible contexts, it provides a view into the functioning and social relations of West African fields of security.