CANCELLED: ASCL Seminar: Limits to Transnational Security Governance in the Sahel

Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has unfortunately been cancelled.

Securitised border governance has now taken center stage in Europe’s relations with its southern neighbours. A development that contains both continuity and change, while giving rise to both new strategic partnerships and various forms of resistance from the implementing partners in the South. Much recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the expansion of European borders into Africa emphasises how border externalisation is increasingly achieved through hi-tech surveillance technology, data collection and cyber-security assemblages that expands and reinforces global borders (Frowd, 2021). However, transnational security governance is often portrayed as working through invisible and concealed power structures, whereby the agency of southern state actors often get lost. Building on fieldwork among EU security staff and Malian state actors in Bamako (2018-2020), this presentation by Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde explores the EU’s security interventions in Mali. Here state actors’ various forms of resistance and claims to sovereignty work to preserve the long-held practices through which southern mobility and the economic extraction from multiple border flows are kept alive. The attention to temporality in the contentious EU/Malian relationship, thus Cold-Ravnkilde, is crucial for understanding the limits to the Western transnational security interventions in the Sahel.

Moderator: Prof. Dr Mirjam de Bruijn (ASCL).