Security at the Borders: Transnational Practices and Technologies in West Africa

Description

Borders are not just lines in the sand, but increasingly globalised spaces of practice. This is the case in West Africa, where a growing range of local and international officials are brought together by ambitious security projects around common anxieties. These projects include efforts to stop irregular migration by sea through international police cooperation, reinforcing infrastructures at border posts, and the application of new digital identification tools to identify and track increasingly mobile citizens. These interventions are driven by global and local security agendas, by biometric passport rules as much as competition between local security agencies. This book draws on the author's multi-sited ethnography in Mauritania and Senegal, showing how border security practices and technologies operate to build state security capacity, transform how state agencies work, and produce new forms of authority and expertise.

Philippe M. Frowd is Assistant Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. His primary research interest is in the transnational governance of security in West Africa's Sahel region, with an emphasis on interventions around irregular migration and border control. His research draws on ongoing fieldwork in West Africa, with his current work focusing on transit migration in Niger. Dr Frowd is a past winner of the Northedge Prize (2013) and his writing has appeared in Security Dialogue, Millennium, International Political Sociology, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.