The border management fairytale

There is no lack of outspoken voices that continue to remind us that Europe’s ‘well-being and progress’ had been built up during the colonial era at the expense of The Wretched of the Earth, as Frantz Fanon had put it in 1961, and how this systematic exploitation has proceeded ever since the so-called ‘decolonization’. Or, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote in his 1987 essay collection Decolonizing the Mind: “Africa’s natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America, but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the continent.”

Today, almost 40 years after its publication, little has changed, at least in principle. Merely the tools, narratives and terminologies applied to maintain and reproduce this extractivist order have evolved. One of the key areas in which we see this order’s preservation and reproduction articulated today is migration.

The main policy framework in this regard is what governments and a vast array of UN agencies, NGOs, private contractors and media outlets usually refer to as ‘migration management’, ‘border management’ or ‘migration governance’. All three notions are being relentlessly evoked in speeches, statements and other forms of government PR, yet always maintain a technical, apolitical connotation. The ‘management’ spin and the slogan ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’ are, however, nothing but deceptive smokescreens for the suppression, containment, filtering and racialization of migration in line with the needs of metropolitan economies and political interests of elites in the Global North and South.

Since the 1990s, Northern (neo)liberals have, by first gradually and now fully embracing the notion of ‘migration management’, successfully mainstreamed the merging of policies to militarize borders, control human movements, hollow out international law, and address labor shortages into a single, neocolonial concept.

The measures considered part of this concept range from the erection of visible or invisible fences and walls to data collection, from deportations to labor recruitment schemes and from ‘development aid’ to a sheer endless stream of ‘capacity building’ projects.

Or in more concrete terms, it ranges from the UK’s notorious ‘Rwanda Plan’ to labor recruitment deals between Northern and Southern governments; from the supply of equipment to the so-called ‘Libyan Coast Guards’ by European states to large-scale biometric data collection at airports in Senegal or the US; from corporate-run visa processing centers in Botswana or South Africa to police training ‘aid’ for authorities in Ghana, Lebanon or Ivory Coast; from the EU-support for the adoption of anti-trafficking or asylum laws in Egypt to the promotion of ‘talent partnerships’ in Bangladesh or Morocco; from Canberra-funded offshore migrant detention centers in Nauru or Papua New Guinea to ‘development’ projects aimed at improving access to health care and potable water in Burkina Faso; and from the deployment of second line immigration officers at Algerian or Pakistani airports to surveys on international migration in Tunisia.

(Neo)colonial continuities

Migration management is, in short, a blend of counterinsurgency tactics and extractivist governance, a fusion of imperial pacification and semi-formalized looting, and a toolbox equipped with carrots and sticks and imposed on racialized populations to commodify mobility and discipline the ‘wretched’.

Yet, many of these policies, tactics or semi-standardized recipes are anything but new and follow a colonial logic. Their roots can often, appallingly, be traced back to the colonial era, vividly illustrated by the research of Yazid Benhadda on how the French imperial administration steered Moroccan migration by “banning or regulating mobility” towards France since the 1920s, or by Ntsika Dapo’s latest take for Africa is a country on how colonial empires manufactured and steered identity and labor across Africa.

Initially propagated by anglophone Northern states as a governance technique, European liberals have refashioned the notion and turned labor recruitment into one of its key pillars, largely dubbing it border and migration management ever since. And Africa is one of the major playgrounds for this concept’s advocates today. The main funders of respective projects are Northern states, while charged with their implementation are state agencies, aid NGOs, private contractors and supranational bodies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the German development agency GIZ or the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). The tools applied to promote and spread this notion across the globe are diverse, yet two of the most influential ones are communication and media training and intergovernmental dialogue fora.

In October 2025, the African Commission published a 200-page training manual on migration governance targeting media practitioners and communication staff of NGOs across the continent. The ICMPD-compiled document claims to aim for the reinforcement of “accurate” reporting on migration “from a position of knowledge and facts, instead of just relying on information from media houses from other regions.” Various similar manuals targeting journalists or civil society had already been launched in the past decade, either by organizations such as IOM or Northern media academies, to spread the management diction across the South.

This latest training guide is, therefore, only a reminder of the prevailing attempt by the border regime industry to increasingly use the African Union as a disseminator, as the manual’s publication is to be certainly followed suit by a new wave of EU-funded workshops for media and PR staff, set up to hammer an order-driven and commodified conception of migration into people’s minds.

Intergovernmental dialogue fora are, meanwhile, used to lure government officials and civic migration actors into – according to an op-ed on the Refugees4Refugees platform – “a tokenistic scramble for collaboration” who, in turn, “become complicit in programs that are meant to facilitate the externalization of EU border control”. Since the 1990s, Northern governments have funded the set-up and operation of a vast semi-institutionalized conference architecture that facilitates for informal non-public consultations on migration dynamics and policies between states in the Global South and North.

The first such forum created was the ICMPD-run Budapest Process, established in 1993 and addressing 52 states across Europe and Asia. While the Bali Process, the Abu Dhabi Dialogue and the Prague Process mainly target Asia, three additional fora involve African governments: the Migration Dialogue for Southern Africa set up in 2000 by IOM and involving the 16 members of the Southern African Development Community and nine observers, including Canada, Australia, the US and the UK; the Rabat Process organized by ICMPD since 2006 and bringing together 57 governments from Europe and western Africa; and since 2014, the ICMPD-run Khartoum Process, targeting governments in northern and eastern Africa.

Law amendments, travel regulations and policing practices that heavily impact the daily life of millions of people are being discussed in these fora without any transparency or public scrutiny. The impact of these dialogues should by no means be underestimated, given that informal consultations between governments often precede the adoption or implementation of concrete policies, as Fabian Georgi pointed out in an early research on ICMPD.

The return of pacification

However, the management propagated here could also be considered a resurrected variant of counterinsurgency and pacification tactics; tactics that had already been tested in colonial times in the form of a “colonial management of immigration”, always imposed “at the service of the metropole”, as Wael Garnaoui and Montassir Sakhiframe it in the case of northern Africa. These tactics have now morphed into refashioned practices that are widely applied across the Global North and South to justify racial policing but also to disguise how the looting of the South continues to fuel wealth disparities and the erection of countless walls and fences.

In this regard, Mark Neocleous’ latest take on the history of police power proves revealing as the dual strategy of simultaneously applying force and promising development to crush resistance and successfully subjugate a population is inherent in both ‘counterinsurgency’ and ‘pacification’ tactics – as it is, too, in the notion of migration management.

In his 2025 book Pacification: Social war and the power of police, Neocleous uses “the concept of pacification to capture the ways in which capitalist order is constituted, wage labor fabricated, obedient subjects created, and domination policed, rendering the modern state a pacification machine”. According to Neocleous, “counterinsurgency is one of the ways in which we find the prose of pacification articulated”, a prose that always eyes with suspicion the “wandering poor”, a “group of ‘masterless’ people perpetually associated with rebellion, seemingly out of reach of the law and beyond the forms of coercive control that might keep them in place”. Unsurprisingly, the “masterless” people “would become, as they remain, a core object of pacification”.

Neocleous exemplifies his elaborations on counterinsurgency and pacification with state tactics, aimed at maintaining imperial rule by simultaneously applying force and offering bait. He refers to the US warfare in Vietnam or the French colonial army’s attempt “to win over the population” in Algeria in the 1950s to maintain (neo)colonial control by flanking its military brutality with pledges to modernization.

Today’s migration management doctrine follows a similar logic, as the concept is staunchly rooted in a comparable twofold approach that entails, on the one hand, curbing movements by applying force – in particular via police cooperation and deportations – and on the other, containing and commodifying mobility by offering development and ‘legal pathways’. Yet, ‘winning over’ a population today means, above all, to steer, regulate and standardize mobility and to pacify potential (un)desired movements.

This is being done by imposing visa and deportation regimes, setting up containment-driven development projects, or by weaponizing pledges for legal pathways to coerce Southern governments to either restrict movements or to help extract the very migrant labor that is, at times, needed in the metropolitan or sub-metropolitan economy.

In short, development aid is pacification as it aims to pacify potential mobility. Visa regimes are pacification as they coerce people to abide to humiliating procedures to gain access to gated communities or fortresses. Racialized policing is counterinsurgency, as those deemed illegal are treated as insurgents, in fact, as ‘masterless’ people.

What the border regime industry largely frames today as ‘safe, orderly and regular’ migration is, thus, a reincarnation of pacification and counterinsurgency tactics, deeply rooted in the empire’s perception of autonomous movement as a threat for today’s global order and, simultaneously, as an opportunity to generate profit.

The demonization and criminalization of those deemed irregular, meanwhile, goes hand-in-hand with the expansion of labor recruitment. The management approach’s development component, usually disguised as a ‘combat against the root causes of irregular migration’, and the promotion of legal pathways are, equally, two sides of the same coin. And such labor recruitment programs are once again mushrooming across the globe.

Those schemes – from campaigns to lure medical personnel from Tunisia into the health sector in Germany or France to Saudi Arabia’s recruitment of domestic workers in Ethiopia – are time and again celebrated by the governments in Nairobi or Cairo for generating remittances, but are, in fact, symbols of the neocolonial extractivism of our time.

However, as Neocleous emphasizes, “the wall is less about inclusion or exclusion than about the policing of movement”. Indeed, border regimes in Europe or North America, but also in South Africa, Libya or Algeria have always tightened or relaxed immigration regulations and crackdowns on migrant mobility in line with the shifting demand for an over-exploitable and a skilled labor force.

Yet, to this day, the underlying driver of the hierarchization of people’s movements in Africa is the legacy of how colonialism “weaponized difference”. Postcolonial elites overtly embraced and are still embracing nationalism as a remedy to maintain their grip on power. Yet in Africa, this nationalism, according to Dapo, surfaces “more often than not” as “a statist ideology designed to manage labor and maintain order” and is rooted in the “sharp divides between citizen workers and non-citizen workers”.

From anti-communism to the war on migration

The increasing obsession with migration management across the continent today materializes in a context in which very little imagination beyond the nation state is allowed to thrive as, eventually, the commodification of mobility and labor not only serves capital and knowledge accumulation in the North, but also falls on fertile grounds across African capitals. Ultimately, the key pillar of border management – police cooperation between Northern and Southern states – not only provides for the control and containment of human movements, but also keeps elites in place.

In 1961, Fanon had already made it clear: “The army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime; an army and a police force which are advised by foreign experts.” Migration management is, however, only the latest variation of counterinsurgency-by-proxy since the collapse of Europe’s empires had morphed into a new, neocolonial arrangement. In this arrangement, population control, public order and resource extraction in the South were to be maintained through policing support by the former master, while the narratives to justify and facilitate this new order repeatedly evolved.

In the 1940s, the key smokescreen for Northern governments to maintain police and military support for Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran, Augusto Pinochet in Chile or Joseph-Désiré Mobuto in the Congo was their staunch opposition to Soviet alignment. For decades to come, anti-communism and the alleged threat of eastward alignment remained the main disguise for Northern governments to provide their allies in now decolonized countries with policing and military hardware to sustain this new order.

In the early 1980s, the US government’s ‘war on drugs’ started to gradually replace anti-communism as the ruse to channel policing equipment towards allied elites. After 9/11, the war on drugs fairytale was supplanted by the ‘war on terror’, providing governments with an even more effective justification for the militarization and further racialization of policing across the globe. Ultimately, the 2015 ‘migration crisis’ in Europe made the prose turn once again, providing ever since for vast deliveries of policing equipment and surveillance technology by northern governments to police and military forces and coast guards across the South, relentlessly justified with the ‘combat against irregular migration’.

In turn, the most effective playbook to follow by Southern elites and regimes to supply their security forces with modern equipment and training, and maintain their often uncontested grip on power, is to tap into the ever-rising border management funds set up by Northern states, ICMPD or UN agencies.

With such funds, European states have provided the coast guards in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Senegal with patrol vessels or surveillance material, border security bodies in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Niger and Algeria with policing gear, and airport authorities across the world with biometric data collection tools and other equipment. Even the notorious Janjaweed militia, known as the Rapid Support Forcesand currently driving yet another bloody genocide in Darfur, have been equipped via EU border management projects.

In short, migration management is not making migration safe, but it makes the plunder of fossil and human resources prosper, racial divisions flourish and the emergence of gated fortresses evolve. Yet, if we were to take Mbaye Bashir Lo’s plea for sovereignty, liberation and justice beyond flag independence seriously, managing borders and those crossing them should certainly not be the order of the day. Instead, a return to the defying spirit of the African Union’s 2006 Position on Migration and Development that framed labor extraction or the securitization of migration as a threat could be a first step towards regaining continental leverage on migration and reimagining borders.

Since the 1990s, Northern (neo)liberals have, by first gradually and now fully embracing the notion of ‘migration management’, successfully mainstreamed the merging of policies to militarize borders, control human movements, hollow out international law, and address labor shortages into a single, neocolonial concept.

What the border regime industry largely frames today as ‘safe, orderly and regular’ migration is, thus, a reincarnation of pacification and counterinsurgency tactics, deeply rooted in the empire’s perception of autonomous movement as a threat for today’s global order and, simultaneously, as an opportunity to generate profit.

In short, migration management is not making migration safe, but it makes the plunder of fossil and human resources prosper, racial divisions flourish and the emergence of gated fortresses evolve. 

Sofian Philip Naceur is a Tunis-based journalist and researcher, formerly working as a freelance correspondent in Cairo and Algiers and now collaborating with various media outlets, human rights groups and collectives across northern Africa and Europe.