Paolo Boccagni will participate in the international conference ‘Governing (African) borders, security and migration‘, convened by EUI and the University of Ghana, to take place in Ghana next 14-15 October.

Paolo’s presentation will be on “Which borders should matter? On the perceived legitimacy and morality of borders among young West African men in an asylum centre”. 

Abstract:  

My presentation reconstructs the meaning(s) of borders to the eyes of young male West African migrants who, often after several attempts, effectively transgressed them along their fragmented pathways to Europe. In my ethnography of an asylum centre in Northern Italy (2018-2022) I was constantly impressed by the marginality of borders in their migration narratives, and by their centrality in everyday life in asylum. Borders, around the EU or in the less institutionalized inter-state space of West Africa, operate by definition to restrain or at least delay unwanted human mobility. However, they may not be seen as legitimate by those they are meant to immobilize. Crossing borders through the “back way” goes along with moral frames such as necessity, fate, or even appropriateness, rather than being constructed as a deviant or illicit practice. There is a parallel, in the narratives of my interlocutors, between the perceived a-morality of “papers” – an unavoidable and instrumental requirement to stay in Europe, rather than a proof of fairness toward them – and the moral irrelevance of borders. The latter is less a matter of cosmopolitan or no-border struggles than a corollarium of a deep-rooted worldview: given the lack of future, if not the pervasive violence back “home”, leaving for Europe at any cost is the right and legitimate thing to do. For sure, the perceived moral irrelevance of state borders does nothing to question their impact on racialized and low-skilled migration. However, it should be taken into account to make sense of migrants’ ways of approaching Europe and taking up huge risks along the way. On occasional conversations within the apparently empty time of life in “waithood”, most of my interlocutors downplay the role of borders in their narratives and memories about “Africa”. This sounds like one essential(ized) black space that is fundamentally different in culture from “Europe”, as an equally monolithic (white) space. At the same time, resilient micro-borders are invariably reproduced in their inter-group relations along lines of ethnocultural, language or religious difference – regardless of any shared “Africanness”. Based on this case study, I contribute to the emerging scholarship on the morality of borders (i.e. their (il)legitimacy to the eyes of prospective movers) and on the shifting alignments of young African migrants, relative to different local and national spaces in the continent they fled from, and they keep seeing as natural home.