Abstract
How do migrants enact their mobilities in contexts where formalized labor migration is minimal, and where the European fight against irregular African migration is restricting the possibilities for informal border crossings? And which roles do cultural norms, social institutions, and individual agency play in facilitating migration? To answer these questions, this article offers a comparative reflection on the growing interest in the mediation of migration that emphasizes the actors and structures that shape and facilitate a migrant trajectory. Drawing on our own research in various West African contexts, and on a broader reading of research evoking the mediation of mobility, we engage primarily with the emerging scholarship on migration infrastructures. As a contribution to the study of how mobility is mediated by actors and structures external to the migrant, we suggest that it is important to move beyond the tendency to restrict analysis in a migrant-/institution-centric trade-off in which emphasis is either placed on migrant aspirations and capabilities or the institutionalized mediation of migration. We further propose to analytically distinguish between the mediation of migration—denoting the processes of facilitation and restriction of mobility through institutions, external interventions, and socio-cultural practices—and the modular components of connection and organization through which actual migration occurs. To accentuate the shifting and volatile configuration of these elements, we suggest a concept of migration infrastructural assemblages. We thereby emphasize the benefits of incorporating improvisation, culture, and volatility in our understanding of the meditation of migration in West Africa and beyond.
Introduction
It has become increasingly clear that human mobility and especially the forms of movement that we usually label “international migration” are disproportionately governed and constrained for a majority of the world's population. While free movement might never have existed in practice, we are witnessing an intensification in the regulation and surveillance of certain types of international migration through restrictive regimes of mobility, such as the tightening of immigration and asylum policies, the externalization and militarization of border control, and the expansion of transnational labor recruitment structures. These changes in migration governance priorities illustrate how it is not only material and technological systems, such as roads, vehicles, or aviation, that enable movement from A to B; contemporary mediations of migration are characterized by a highly selective filtering (Gammeltoft-Hansen 2009) of access to movement. While such filtering measures may be more or less tangible—from red tape to border fences—they shape access to safe and legal migration in highly unequal ways (Kleist and Thorsen 2017).
These shifts in the global political economy of migration governance may help explain the recent interest among migration scholars in understanding the external mediation of migration. To this end, a rich literature on the formal or informal organization of migration and migratory practices has emerged (see Collins 2020 for an overview). In this line of thinking, the concept of infrastructure has been reconceptualized as an analytical framework to enable insights into how various socio-technical systems connect and undergird the movement of people, things, and ideas (Larkin 2013, 328). More particularly, the notion of migration infrastructure has been suggested as a theoretical and methodological tool to examine how migration is organized and facilitated by multiple actors and institutions, thereby shifting the analytical attention from migrant identities and intentions to what makes migration practically possible (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Lin et al. 2017; Kleist and Bjarnesen 2019).
This article offers a conceptual reflection on the infrastructural turn in migration research and the growing interest in the mediation of mobility trajectories. Based on our longitudinal research on West African labor mobilities, we offer a comparative regional perspective to this literature. It is, to our knowledge, one of the first attempts to employ a migration infrastructure approach in the West African context. The literature so far has been dominated by Asian contexts, with particular focus on state and commercial brokerage of labor migration, and emerging studies on Europe and the global north, where institutionalized precaritization of refugees and (irregular) migrants is a pivotal concern.
Studying West African low-wage labor migration, we argue, brings attention to situations characterized by three overall dimensions. First, a historical dimension emphasizing migration practices as integral to well-established livelihood strategies and to long-standing notions of pathways for a better or more worthy life. Second, a structural dimension in which migration governance is characterized by minimal state organization or large-scale commercial recruitment. Third, a geopolitical dimension characterized by an overall migration context of political instability in combination with increasingly intensified militarized border control in transit and departure areas of (perceived) Europe-destined migration. Incorporating such perspectives is a pertinent empirical and analytical contribution to an approach that accentuates the importance of shifting and varied infrastructure constellations in shaping mobility trajectories (cf. Xiang and Lindquist 2014). Our aim is thus to outline an analytical approach that examines the external mediation of mobility in conjunction with a migrant perspective that emphasizes improvisation, culture, and volatility. In this way, we posit, engagement with West African migration becomes a productive site for rethinking and conceptualizing a processual understanding of the mediation of migration. This includes attention to how impositions on the outlooks and possibilities of migrants vary over time; how they may be differentially deployed; and how unpredictable their effects may be.
We base this reflection on a dialogue with migration infrastructure studies, the new mobilities paradigm, assemblage theory, urban studies, and the literature on the socio-cultural meanings and imaginaries of migration, with examples of West African low-wage labor mobility trajectories from our own empirical research. We thereby call for a more processual understanding of the mediation of migration. To further accentuate the shifting constellations and volatility of the mediation of migration, we employ the term migration infrastructural assemblages, which suggests a more explicit heuristic distinction between mediation, on the one hand, and the various dimensions and components of infrastructure, on the other hand. The former refers to the processes of facilitation of mobility taking place through institutions, external interventions, and socio-cultural practices, where brokerage is central (Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012). The latter include various sets of institutions and modular components of connection and organization through which migration occurs.
The explicit distinction between mediation and the different elements and modules of infrastructures allows us to critically consider which processes and elements are at play in a particular migration context as well as the intensity of specific (dis)entanglements and their spatial and temporal dimensions. We thereby highlight the situatedness, historicity, and inertia of infrastructures and of the mediation of mobility more broadly. This perspective is particularly relevant when migration involves passing difficult terrains or infrastructural disruption, whether due to the absence of roads, conflict, or militarized border surveillance. It reminds us that migration and its mediation may take place through but also outside or despite particular infrastructural assemblages, accentuating their potential absence, incompleteness, varying degrees of effectiveness, and unintended usages. With its insistence on different infrastructural components and dimensions, the distinction helps to avoid a collapse of terminologies where infrastructures are used as an umbrella term for all kinds of systems as well as for their mediation, losing analytical cogency (cf. Buier 2022). It is thereby helpful in interrogating the analytical purchase and explanatory power of infrastructure.
In the following, we begin by considering the infrastructural turn in anthropology and other disciplines and some recent contributions to the development of a migration infrastructure approach. We then proceed by reflecting more broadly on the theoretical underpinnings for analyzing infrastructure and the mediation of movement in migration research, drawing on our own research in different West African contexts, before elaborating some conceptual cornerstones for such an endeavor. We conclude by outlining the potentials and challenges in the analysis of migration infrastructural assemblages, arguing that the shift away from a migrant-centered approach risks restricting itself to an overly institution-centered one.
The Infrastructural Turn
Infrastructure analysis has become a significant trend in social science, with innovative studies of the social, political, esthetic, cultural, and economic repercussions of pipes, road construction, electrification, etc. (e.g., Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018a; Bachman and Schouten 2018; Larkin 2013; Star 1999). Moving beyond a more delimited and technical understanding, this literature perceives infrastructure as “critical locations through which sociality, governance, and politics, accumulation and dispossession, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed, and performed” (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018b, 3). Turning the analytical attention to issues of planning and power inherent in infrastructures, as well as the social and political perspectives of their construction and maintenance, these studies raise questions about the inclusion and exclusion of the envisioned users of infrastructures, of whose needs are served, and of who are left out. An overall insight is thus that infrastructures are not neutral but may (re)produce inequalities.
Broadly speaking, we can distinguish between two overall conceptualizations of infrastructure within this literature. On the one hand, a materialist understanding of infrastructure as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space” (Larkin 2013, 328), constituting “matter that enables the movement of other matter” (ibid., 329). On the other hand, a constructivist approach where social networks and institutions are seen as connectivity systems and conceptualized as forms of (social) infrastructure (Kleinman 2014; Simone 2004, 2015a, 2015b). Studies of legal infrastructures constitute another emerging field (e.g., Pellandini-Simányi and Vargha 2019). Here, as in the constructivist approach, infrastructure takes on a figurative meaning in that the “matter moving other matter” consists of social relations, law, or other social phenomena that move or connect people or things (Chua et al. 2018, 623). In such instances, infrastructure analysis moves closer to other analytical traditions linking individuals to broader systems of connectivity and distribution, such as actor–network theory and assemblage theory.
Migration Infrastructures
Constituted by connectivity and movement, migration is an obvious field where an infrastructure perspective might add new insights. 1 Much of the bourgeoning literature on this theme draws on the conceptualization proposed by anthropologists Biao Xiang and Johan Lindquist (2014) in the 50-year anniversary issue of International Migration Review. Building on their long-standing work on low-skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, Xiang and Lindquist define migration infrastructures as “the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility” (2014, S122). They suggest five overlapping dimensions—the commercial, regulatory, technological, humanitarian, and social—that are interconnected in myriad ways and “must be considered together […] to foreground intersectionality as an operational logic of how migration is actually constituted” (2014, S135; cf. Collins 2020). The concept thus hinges on an understanding of infrastructure as having both a material and a more metaphorical meaning, bringing together various levels and dimensions of connectivity. It throws light on how international migratory movements are, to a significant extent, facilitated by other actors as well as material, social, institutional, and technological systems and structures. Such analysis thus serves “to unpack processes of mediation” (2014, S122) rather than foreground analysis of migrant behavior and intentionality.
The pioneering studies of migration infrastructures focused on Asian contexts, with two special issues of Mobilities (2017) and Pacific Affairs (2018) as significant contributions. Institutionalized migrant labor preparation, recruitment agencies, and other kinds of brokers constitute an overarching focus, with case studies set in, inter alia, China (Xiang 2017; Hu, Lingling, and Tu 2020), Malaysia (Lindquist 2017; Chang 2018), Nepal (Kern and Müller-Böker 2015; Shrestha 2018), and the Philippines (Ortiga 2018). The entanglement of state and private actors and the governmental repercussions of institutionalized infrastructure are central themes, accentuating the intersections of regulatory and commercial infrastructural dimensions and portraying migrants as encapsulated by mediating structures and actors throughout their migrant trajectories (Lindquist 2022). Migrants are not only controlled, screened, selected, trained, prepared, and moved through the interventions of a range of interlinked institutions and brokers; their aspirations and subjectivities are shaped as productive and suitable workers (Shrestha 2018; Chang 2018). Social networks seem to be of less importance. This overall situation can be described as infrastructural involution, where “the interplay between different dimensions of migration infrastructure make it self-perpetuating and self-serving, and impedes rather than enhances people's migratory capability” (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, S122), as the expansion of infrastructure becomes an end in itself.
More recently, case studies in other geographical settings have emerged, with attention to justice and the production of precarity (see Kathiravelu 2021). While expanding the regional focus to Western contexts, African perspectives are still largely absent from literature on migration infrastructure (for an exception see Landau 2021), although African refugees and migrants in Europe may be included as objects of mediation and control (Leurs 2019; Meeus, Arnaut, and van Heur 2019; Sigona, Kato, and Kuznetsova 2021).
An important precursor—and affiliated literature—is the new mobilities studies, with its holistic and multiscale approach to analyzing the role of mobility and immobility in society (e.g., Sheller and Urry 2006; Schiller and Salazar 2013). Of specific relevance here are studies on the mediation of complex routes and trajectories (e.g., Cresswell 2010; Schapendonk, van Liempt, and Steel 2018) as well as attention to “the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities” (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 3), like highways, bus companies, or airports (cf. Lindquist 2017; Adey 2006). Examining how different (im)mobilities are constituted, constrained, or facilitated has resonance in a migration infrastructure approach. With the unpacking of mediation as an overall analytical endeavor, this implies analysis of the interrelationships, overlaps, and collisions of infrastructural elements in specific sites and at multiple scales. Here we see a proliferation of analytical terms referring to processes and sites where migration is mediated and brokered, such as “the middle space of migration” (Kern and Müller-Böker 2015), “spaces of intermediation” and “brokerage” (Shrestha and Yeoh 2018), “channels” (Lindquist 2017), “aspirational infrastructure” (Shrestha 2018), and “platforms” (Collins 2020).
Though rarely conceptualized as such, these terms suggest a familiarity with an assemblage approach (see Heil 2020). In Anderson and McFarlane's (2011, 124) words, assemblages are “composed of heterogeneous elements that may be human and non-human, organic and inorganic, technical and natural,” assembled and dis-assembled over time and space. Drawing on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, this approach constitutes an attempt to challenge conceptions of society as an organic whole where different elements are dependent on each other (Delanda 2006; Marcus and Saka 2006; McFarlane 2011). Instead, society is defined by heterogeneity and shifting connections between components. This implies “that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different” (Delanda 2006, 10).
Proposing the term of migration infrastructural assemblages, we wish to accentuate the composite and relational nature of the mediation of migration and its modular components of connection. This framing prompts attention to processes of assembly and disassembly of disparate elements—be they of a regulatory, commercial, social, technological, or humanitarian nature (to invoke Xiang and Lindquist's approach)—foregrounding emergent and shifting constellations. This does not imply that assemblages cannot be sluggish or generate encompassing political effects, directing or constraining migratory movements or other phenomena, quite the contrary (see, e.g., Abrahamsen and Williams 2011). Rather, the point is that there is not one unified actor or power that generates predetermined results. Volatility is therefore central.
In the following section, we reflect on West African migration experiences as a step towards addressing these perspectives, starting with a historical outline of the mediation of labor mobilities in this geographical context. We thereby contribute a novel empirical dimension to the migration infrastructure literature, as well as a set of derived analytical insights with broader conceptual implications.
West African Labor Mobilities in Historical Perspective
Historically, the West African subregion has been characterized by a pronounced mobility of people. Prior to the imposition of colonial territorial borders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the movement of people, and sometimes of entire societies, was employed as a strategy to adapt to changing circumstances, such as expansion through warfare, seasonal or lasting environmental shifts, societal fusions or fissions, or in response to new opportunities for trade and other forms of exchange (e.g., Kopytoff 1987; Asiwaju 1976; Mbembe 2001). The transatlantic slave trade enforced relocations of millions of enslaved Africans across continents. Colonization, although highly varied in its impact across the subregion, imposed new extractive infrastructures which generally relied on the exploitation of densely populated regions as a source of labor for the most fertile coastal regions of the new colonial territories (Amin 1974; Mbembe 2021).
Despite the tumultuous political transformations of the independence era of the 1960s, many new West African nation-states perpetuated migration policies that paralleled such colonial strategies (e.g., Cordell, Gregory, and Piché 1996; Madiéga and Nao 2003; Rain 1999). For example, seasonal or permanent migration from Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, and Mali to more prosperous urban and rural parts of the subregion and cross-border trade continue to be important economic and social phenomena to this day. These enduring forms of regional labor circulation are not only an important livelihood strategy for individuals and households; they have also constituted the backbone of the world's largest cocoa-producing economies in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana (Bjarnesen 2016).
Although encouraged by national and regional legislation, as we elaborate further below, the most decisive shift from the colonial to the postcolonial era has perhaps been that such labor mobility is facilitated primarily by the outlooks and networks of migrants themselves, with little or no state intervention. These forms of self-initiated mobilities are thereby a constitutive element of labor recruitment processes and of professional identities in a variety of sectors (Bertrand 2011). Cross-border circulation and the skillfulness required to navigate the opportunities and risks offered by borderland areas are essential for many traders (Ayimpam 2015; Flynn 1997). Artisanal miners are dependent on their capability to follow new discoveries and innovations, effectively constituting a moving “mining frontier” (Werthmann and Grätz 2012). Combatants from the region's armed conflicts have been known to circulate between countries (Hoffman 2011), and seasonal agricultural laborers have shown a similar ingenuity in their search for employment opportunities over longer and shorter distances.
There are exceptions to this absence of institutionalized mediation, though. Awumbila et al. (2019) show that the formal and semiformal recruitment of domestic workers in Ghana has expanded since the mid-2000s, mainly targeting the Ghanaian market but also international destinations, especially prior to a government ban in 2017 that prohibited recruitment of labor migrants to the Gulf countries. Combatant mobilities—in which military chains of command include designated recruiters who make their living traveling across national borders to locate new recruits and seasoned combatants (Bjarnesen 2018; Hoffman 2011)—are another example where well-organized recruitment plays a significant role.
That said, the relative absence of state intervention and commercial brokerage as constitutive dimensions of migration infrastructural assemblages across these diverse cases of internal West African labor migration is inescapable. Instead, migration in these contexts is often self-organized, stepwise in nature (cf. Schapendonk and Steel 2014), and draws on social networks and other personal connections, mediated through kinship, friendship, or work, or even in relation to strangers met en route. Vested in these forms of personal bonds and connections, rather than being mediated through commercialized and institutionalized brokerage, West African labor migration generally relies on cultural institutions of fosterage, hospitality, and patronage (e.g., Hahn and Klute 2007) or on notions of adventure or hustling that motivate individual improvisation and savvy (Bredeloup 2017; Gaibazzi 2015).
In the following section, we illustrate the predominance of social networks and socio-cultural idioms as central migration infrastructural assemblages through two mobility trajectories from our own research on West African mobilities. They are both constructed cases, combining ethnographic material from several of our sources that reflect larger tendencies. More specifically, Patrice's story is based on longitudinal fieldwork in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, between 2009 and 2017 on the mobile life stories of Burkinabe labor migrants returning from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire (Bjarnesen 2019), totaling approximately 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork. The example of Kwesi is drawn from a research project on precarious migration projects and involuntary return migration, with altogether 8 months of fieldwork in Ghana during three stays between 2012 and 2015 (Kleist 2017a, 2017b, 2020).
Twist and Turns: Two West African Mobility Trajectories
The stories of Patrice from Burkina Faso and Kwesi from Ghana revolve around low-wage labor migration within and beyond the West African subregion. Growing up in two localities where migration constitutes an imagined pathway for a better future, both were keen to migrate from an early age and set off to Côte d’Ivoire and Libya, respectively, as young men.
Patrice was born in central Burkina Faso, from where migration towards neighboring Côte d’Ivoire has been an important livelihood strategy for several generations (Bjarnesen 2013). This regional labor mobility has historically been oriented towards the Ivorian cocoa economy, which is the largest in the world, but since the mid-1990s, many migrants also try their luck in the informal urban economy in the financial capital of Abidjan on the coast. The idea of following in the path of his parents and peers had thus been with him as long as he could remember.
When he was in his teens, an opportunity arose to follow through. A childhood friend already living in Côte d’Ivoire, Ousmane, was visiting the village and offered to bring Patrice with him on his return. Ousmane had left the village several years earlier and had been able to work his way into a position of owning his own cocoa plantation and seeing a modest profit from the production. He was looking for reliable workers from his home village to help him expand his production and also to honor the principles that had enabled his own achievements. Although they grew up as peers, Patrice was eager to enter into this bond of patronage—a kind of mentorship expressed locally through the socio-cultural institution of the tutorat (Chauveau 2006)—with Ousmane, who had become his social senior through his successful migration to Côte d’Ivoire. Although Patrice had been hoping for a chance to migrate in this precise way for as long as he could remember, he was not aware of the details of how to proceed, so Ousmane paid for Patrice's minibus tickets and helped out with sorting the necessary paperwork, such as acquiring an identity card and a WHO yellow fever certificate. Since both countries have ratified the ECOWAS regional protocol for the free movement of persons, no visas, residence or work permits were required. Border controls have always been sparse and lenient, meaning that student ID cards are usually accepted despite official policies to the contrary, and that even travelers without identification are allowed to pass by paying small bribes or negotiating their way through.
Once in Côte d’Ivoire, Patrice worked on Ousmane's cocoa plantation, learning the ropes and saving money for his own piece of land. He was able to buy a plot of land after a few years and proceeded to marry a woman from his hometown in Burkina Faso. He would travel to Burkina Faso regularly to meet his family and bring home some of his earnings, and he occasionally brought a young relative or acquaintance with him back to help out with the farming. Patrice's fortunes changed when the Ivorian armed conflict broke out in 2002. As migrant “strangers” became the target of xenophobic violence in the southern parts of the country, he was forced to flee to Ghana in 2003, eventually making it back to Burkina Faso.
Kwesi was in his 20s when he left for Libya the first time. Like Patrice, his migration was inspired by the visit of a childhood friend but one who had made it to Germany after a spell in Libya, an established labor destination for younger men in Kwesi's town. At the time, Kwesi already held a diploma in IT but struggled to make ends meet and decided to try his luck. He left on a Tuesday morning with 12 other young men, led by a local connection man, a former migrant from his hometown. Taking mini- and long-distance busses, they made it to Burkina Faso and then to Agadez in Niger, where they joined a larger group of West African travelers. Packed in an overcrowded Toyota pickup truck for five days and guided by Tuareg transporters, they traveled across the Sahara and into the borderlands of Algeria. The group had to walk the last distance on foot, traversing a mountain pass in the rocky Hoggar range, a journey Kwesi described as extremely strenuous and dangerous. They were then pointed towards a Libyan border town by the guide and left to their own devices. Splitting up into smaller groups, Kwesi and his fellow travelers reached a farm and eventually met a Ghanaian mason and took up masonry, as so many other Ghanaians in Libya. Kwesi found the work tedious, though, and decided to head for Spain instead, persuading a cousin in the United States to wire him money for the trip. At this point, his journey was disrupted, as he was arrested on the border between Algeria and Morocco and deported back to Algeria, from where the Algerian police further deported him to the border with Mali. “They just left us in the desert, in a no-man's land, pointing us in the direction we should walk,” Kwesi recalled. He eventually managed to get to Bamako and then back to Ghana on his own, broke and exhausted.
After three years, Kwesi traveled overland to Libya again, going by himself as he now knew the route, as he said. This trip also ended abruptly. Working for an international company in Tripoli, he was satisfied with his job situation, with no ambitions of traveling to Europe, depositing the larger part of his salary in a Libyan bank account. When the civil war broke out in 2011, however, the bank burnt down and Kwesi lost his savings. Though reluctant to leave, he was evacuated through a joint UNDP-IOM operation in March 2011 (see also Kandilige and Hamidou 2019) and flown to Ghana where he was debriefed at the airport and received a small amount of money to cover his bus ticket back to his hometown on his own.
We should, of course, be careful in drawing too comprehensive conclusions based on such individual experiences, even if they resemble many other migration trajectories that we have come across. Nevertheless, a few characteristics are striking when we consider these two trajectories in relation to the existing literature on mediation and migration infrastructures. First, the importance of social networks stands out whether we look at the processes of migrating, finding work, or settling down. Second, the nature of their trajectories is stepwise, with some self-organized legs of the journey, some assistance through unknown lands, and some unwanted and enforced relocations, whether due to war or deportation. Third, parts of both journeys take place in areas with delimited modular components of material infrastructures, such as the Hoggar Mountains that Kwesi traversed by foot or the village in central Burkina Faso where Patrice began his journey. Fourth, in addition to the informal brokerage that enabled some parts of Kwesi's irregular journey, both experiences are underscored by a set of migrant imaginaries that have developed over several generations, by which some destinations and vocations are seen as more viable than others. Finally, despite the informal and culturally consolidated trajectories, both experiences feature significant moments of improvisation, adaptation, and migrant agency.
The migration infrastructural assemblages outlined above thus constitute a stark contrast to the Asian examples. This applies to the extensive institutional mediation of labor migration in Asia, where the regulatory, commercial, and technological dimensions of migration infrastructure are prominent and migrants may be “escorted and encapsulated from the beginning until the end of the migration circuit” (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, S131; Lindquist 2022). Neither Patrice nor Kwesi used recruitment agencies or other state or formally institutionalized actors to find work or leave their home countries but were inspired by friends and other people in their immediate surroundings. That said, they did not enact their mobilities completely on their own but were assisted by family, friends, townspeople, local connection men, and transporters as well as being displaced and restricted by border authorities, police patrols, or Ivorian youth militias. While neither of them was detained in prisons, camps, or by criminal gangs, detention has become another significant element in many interregional migrations on the continent and elsewhere (MMC 2022), adding significantly to the volatility of the journey. We also see the importance of improvisation and agency, as journeys and trajectories take twist and turns, with several departures and arrivals in response to a series of unforeseeable events (cf. Kleist 2017a, 2020).
Migration Brokerage and Legal Infrastructures
To some extent, the dynamics described above have also been true of West African off-continent migration. Off-continent migration initially took place to the former colonial centers but from the 1980s also to other European countries, North America, the Gulf States, China, and Latin America. Brokers do play a role in regional and intraregional West African migration as well, procuring and facilitating various travel documents, organizing parts of the journeys, and perhaps initial accommodation and employment, particularly in the case of long-distance migration (Alpes 2016; Kleist 2017b; Lucht 2011). 2 As pointed out in the literature on migration industries, such services may be of a legal or illicit nature, ranging from fabricating passports to obtaining authorized visas and organizing plane tickets, and may span from prepping Togolese visa hopefuls for embassy interviews in the American Diversity Visa Lottery (Piot and Batema 2019) to stranded migrants “pushing” fellow travelers into busses and pickup trucks in Niger (Lucht 2013).
When considering the increasing long-distance brokerage and migration governance, we also need to factor in the regional mobility regime in West Africa. Contrary to the tendencies in most parts of the world in recent years, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has reaffirmed its principle of free circulation of people across the borders of the West African subregion, ratified originally through the 1979 Protocol relating to Free Movement of Persons, Residence and Establishment. This principle envisions West Africa as an integrated space that transcends the divisions inherited by colonial rule and stimulates economic initiative in a unified market (Bjarnesen and Bisong 2023). 3 It also reflects a long history of regional labor migration—from the movements induced by the Atlantic slave trade to later uses of forced and “free” labor by colonial powers—and its fundamental role in shaping demographic, economic, and socio-political structures in West Africa until the present day. Furthermore, it expresses a recognition that most of West Africa's borders have been relatively porous and easy to cross, and that this unregulated circulation by and large has been beneficial for the regional economic community and its individual member states.
At the regional level, so-called “parallel trade” and informal economies have prospered in borderland areas as a consequence of incomplete regional integration (Meagher 1997). Moreover, travelers, migrants, and traders still have to deal with the extortive practices of border police and customs officials. In other words, if we understand the principle of free movement within ECOWAS as an element that channels or interrupts mobility, we see that it offers important facilitators as well as constraints to regional migration. As an element in migration infrastructural assemblage, its significance and effects change according to how it is used (or ignored). We need to go beyond formal institutions, policies, and bureaucratic roles, however, to appreciate these complex mediating effects.
Informality and Improvisation
In contrast to the emphasis on the infrastructural planning power and encapsulated migration circuits of East Asian migration, regional and off-continent migration from West Africa is often framed as everyday mobilities and characterized by irregularity and informality (de Bruijn et al. 2000) and as driven by viable and somewhat ungovernable livelihood strategies enacted by individual migrants and/or households. This hands-off attitude seems characteristic of the state's handling of other livelihood sectors in many African contexts as well. For example, small-scale traders might be breaking laws by hawking on street corners but are tolerated due to a recognition of the lack of legal alternatives and formal employment for a majority of the population (Monteith and Giesbert 2017). Rather than a simple dichotomy between the formal and the informal, the state is often deeply implicated in processes we might characterize as “informal.” As Roy (2005, 149) insists in her work on urban planning, “informality must be understood not as the object of state regulation but rather as produced by the state itself.” At the same time, the concept may be used in ways that gloss over its underlying complexities. Indeed, the term “‘informal economy’ allows academics and bureaucrats to incorporate the teeming street life of exotic cities into their abstract models without having to know what people are really up to” (Hart 2009, 20).
Hence, informality is best understood as “an organizing logic, a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation itself” (Roy 2005, 148) in contrast to the lack or absence of rules and regulation. Such logics are not necessarily distinct from or in opposition to state policies, but they tend to be shaped and enacted from below, on the basis of “what people are up to” in the practice of everyday life, to paraphrase Hart's observation above.
Urban qualitative research, in this way, provides an avenue for exploring informality and other aspects of infrastructural complexity in relation to West African migration. As already alluded to, the notion of infrastructure lends itself to a broad range of phenomena and contexts, including those not exclusively related to the facilitation of movement of material matter or persons. While urban infrastructures do mediate the mobilities of its residents in various ways, scholars of urban Africa have emphasized that even when material infrastructures may seem dysfunctional, they can in fact be productive in other ways than their intended purposes allow. De Boeck (2012) offers an evocative illustration of how the failings of urban planning and maintenance may create new opportunities: Potholes or pools of water on a public road, to give but one example, may become infrastructural elements in themselves, because they create thickenings of publics, and offer the possibility of assembling people, or of slowing them down (so that one might sell them something along the road, for example).
Much of the literature in this vein builds on Simone's (2004) influential notion of “people as infrastructure.” By taking the reader on a journey through the inner city of postapartheid Johannesburg, Simone (2004, 407) suggests that what the dilapidating urban infrastructure lacks in terms of predictability, security, and service provision, it repays in its facilitation of “incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used.” In a context where the state has virtually withdrawn from large sections of the inner city, new groups of residents create their own working orders of more or less illicit forms of trade and exchange of services which would not have been possible under the gaze of a more effective urban governance regime. Here, as Xiang and Lindquist (2014, S133) note, “the social directly takes an infrastructural form” by creating what Simone (2004, 408) refers to as “a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city.”
Kleinman's (2014, 287) study of West African migrants at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris evokes a similar notion of social infrastructure as “a hub of creating encounters across difference, and a site where social interaction can occur that could not happen elsewhere.” While Simone's “intersections of residents” are facilitated by the relative absence of the state, Kleinman's social infrastructures are confronted with the patrolling eye of the French authorities in their search for undocumented migrants. In both cases, however, the notion of social infrastructure characterizes situations where formal governance is stacked against urban residents who are brought together because of, not despite, these unfavorable circumstances. Much as the flooded road evoked by De Boeck, the abandoned inner city and the patrolled space of Gare du Nord create the conditions for productive encounters that go against the formal purposes of the spaces they inhabit.
These works on urban social infrastructures offer two important conceptual contributions for the purposes of this discussion. First of all, the notion of social infrastructure clearly shows how formal governance structures, or indeed their relative absence, may contribute to encounters and synergies far beyond the intended purposes of those structures. This complicates the distinction between functional and dysfunctional infrastructures and obliges an acute attention to the positionalities of the actors at the center of the analysis and the processes of assembly and disassembly of infrastructural elements. Institutionalized migration infrastructures may work so smoothly that migrants’ mobility is shaped and set in motion by other actors and institutions from beginning to end, to the extent that the possibilities for improvisation or individual agency on the part of the migrant are limited. Conversely, the relative absence of commercialized and state-sanctioned regional migration recruitment industries in West Africa facilitates a higher degree of self-organized and socially embedded mobilities where adaptability, creativity, and improvisational capacity are key, as we saw in the migration trajectories of Patrice and Kwesi. This does not mean that migration infrastructures are absent in the overall West African context. It means that the infrastructural assemblages are differently constituted, with significantly different relationalities between social, institutional, and commercial elements. The following section draws some conceptual conclusions from the discussion of these contextual differences and from the broader reading of the scholarship on the mediation of mobility.
Three Conceptual Implications in Migration Infrastructure Research
The analysis of West African labor mobilities offers useful analytical insights, not least in a comparative perspective. Illuminating central spheres of the mediation of mobility, we have especially taken note of the diverging infrastructural assemblages in the overall contexts of low-wage regional labor migration in South East Asia and West Africa. Whereas the former is characterized by infrastructural involution through an intensification and entanglement of commercial and regulative actors and institutions, the role of improvisation, social networks, and stepwise and often self-organized migration trajectories prevail in the latter. This also indicates that a migration infrastructure approach in its current conceptualization does not necessarily capture all central aspects of the mediation of West African migration. These broad observations lead us to articulate three conceptual implications of the juxtaposition of South East Asian and West African migration infrastructure assemblages.
Firstly, the belief in and practice of low-wage migration as a pathway to a better life constitutes a significant social imaginary that underpins mobility practices and future making in many parts of West Africa (e.g., Kleist 2017c). An analysis of the mediation of mobility that fails to account for the sociality and cultural repertoires that mobility practices are embedded in is conceptually incomplete, if not flawed. The notion of going on adventure is a case in point. Primarily used in Francophone West Africa, “adventure” (aventure) refers to (mainly) male youth migration to “unknown places” to work and mature (Bredeloup 2017; Dougnon 2015; Kleinman 2019). Ideally, in this imaginary, the adventurer returns to his place of origin as a mature adult man with his own family. Adventure, then, constitutes “a hopeful trajectory toward social becoming” (Kleinman 2019, 154) that revolves around the experience of migrating and dealing with adversities. It is, in other words, a far cry from the encapsulated and highly organized migrations mediated through institutionalized recruitment agencies.
Second, the migration infrastructure approach runs the risk of underestimating or obscuring the ways in which migrants and other actors make alternative uses of existing infrastructures. Broadly speaking, what may often end up facilitating the movement of people cannot be reduced to the planned or intended uses or effects of migration infrastructural dimensions—not even, we posit, in cases where such structures are highly institutionalized. In the West African contexts we have evoked here, where the regulatory dimension of migration infrastructures tends to be less prominent for intraregional migration, we have argued that social networks as well as cultural idioms of how and where to move become central in an informal regulation of mobility. At the same time, the distinction between formal and informal regulation should not be overstated, as actors may also make use of formal structures in unpredictable and improvisational ways in their stepwise trajectories. The use of recruitment agencies or tourist visas, for instance, does not necessarily imply that migrants follow prescribed or formal ways of moving, working, or staying. Likewise, it does not prevent migrants from combining the activities entailed by their officially recognized status with other engagements, such as undocumented work or the pursuit of intimate relationships that may generate further possibilities. From the point of view of migrants and their social networks, these activities and possibilities are enabled because of, not despite, the overlaps and synergies between formal and informal spheres. Migrant agency is thereby re-inscribed in the mediation of migration and hence in how migration infrastructural assemblages actually work.
As the above reflections and empirical examples indicate, the absence of a formal commercial and regulatory migration infrastructure does not imply the absence of migration and its mediation. Rather, they demonstrate that various migration infrastructural assemblages are shaped by contexts of conflict, securitization, and militarization and maybe even thrive because of the limited access to authorized migration routes and state-sanctioned brokerage. This observation warrants caution in assuming a direct causal link between the intended role(s) of migration infrastructures and their actual usage or effects. This caution is especially pertinent in contexts characterized by low degrees of institutionalized, and the predominance of more socially mediated, assemblages of infrastructural dimensions.
To be sure, the implication here is not to stay clear of the political repercussions of migration infrastructure (cf. Lin et al. 2017). Hence, a third conceptual implication is to pay attention to the relationship between migration governance and hegemonic power structures. In a context where the governance and regulation of migration are dominating political agendas, it is pertinent that our analytical frameworks take such perspectives into account. Spijkerboer (2018, 456), for instance, observes that countries in the Global North actively seek to control access to global mobility infrastructures, rather than limiting their sphere of influence simply to controlling access to their own territory. This understanding vividly illustrates the governing and exclusionary or, more simply put, the political effects of migration infrastructural assemblages. As Lin et al. (2017, 170) insist, infrastructures are “always already inscribed with planning power, which dictates who gets or does not get to benefit from their socio-material arrangements. Naturalized as taken-for-granted systems, infrastructures can and do perform politics in their daily use.” The fact that the rescue of migrants in the Mediterranean is increasingly criminalized as human smuggling further emphasizes this politicization and highlights the ambiguities of the so-called humanitarian infrastructure dimension and the necropolitical effects of contemporary regimes of mobility (Mbembe 2003). Failing to acknowledge this hegemonic effect runs the risk of depoliticizing migration infrastructures and the mediation of mobility.
Conclusion
Taking departure in the proliferating interest in the mediation of migration that emphasizes the actors and structures that shape and facilitate migrant trajectories, we have explored the analytical potential of a migration infrastructure approach. As an overall contribution, we suggest that it is important to move beyond the tendency to restrict analysis in a migrant-/institution-centric trade-off in which emphasis is either placed on migrant aspirations and capabilities or on the institutionalized mediation of migration. Such an endeavor thus contributes to the migration study literature that challenges the agency–structure divide (see, e.g., Bakewell 2010; de Haas 2021) but with specific focus on the potential of an infrastructure approach.
A first contribution in this regard is implied in the term migration infrastructural assemblages, which accentuates the relationality between different human and nonhuman modular components of connection and circulation and their inherent volatility. Rather than migration infrastructure in the singular, with its possible connotations of functioning and solid connectivity systems, this directs attention to changing compositions over time and space. Studies of migration infrastructural assemblages in different regional and historical settings are thus called for.
Our second contribution is to introduce a West African perspective to this literature. Not only does this novel regional focus provide new empirical findings, it also expands the conceptual scope of the approach. We argue that such an expansion involves two distinct analytical dimensions: first, the explicit acknowledgment of socio-cultural imaginaries and repertoires as a migration infrastructural element, including the capacity of improvisation under adverse circumstances, and second, a more acute attention to volatility and informality as constitutive characteristics of infrastructural entanglement. Much low-wage West African labor migration takes place in a legal context of free regional movement and is characterized by minimal state-driven and formalized recruitment. In contrast to practices of escort and encapsulation, such mobilities draw upon long-established mobile livelihoods and migration as imagined pathways of social becoming, underpinned by socio-cultural practices such as the tutorat, “adventure,” and other modes of sociality with kin, compatriots, or fellow travelers as points of connection. Here we suggest looking to Africanist urban studies, particularly those focusing on informality and “social infrastructure” (Simone 2004; Kleinman 2014; 2019) that explore connections and practices under circumstances where state actors are either absent or are actively seeking to counteract such mediations, and where the ability to improvise is key. Rather than infrastructural involution that indicates a density of connecting elements in migration infrastructural assemblages, this may constitute a situation of infrastructural devolution where assemblages are made up by more locally based and loosely connected elements. Hence, while attention to the planned and political dimensions of migration infrastructure is critical, we should not conflate intended and actual usages.
At the epistemological level, we have shown that the literature on infrastructure operates with a certain elasticity, ranging from built, material infrastructure (e.g., Appel et al. 2018a), on the one hand, to a more metaphorical and constructivist understanding, on the other. The concept of migration infrastructure incorporates both understandings. Nevertheless, it risks losing analytical cogency if all dimensions of connectivity and mobility are subsumed under the heading of infrastructure (cf. Biuer 2022). Our third overall contribution is therefore an analytical distinction between mediation and modular components of infrastructure.
It is noteworthy that the physical movement of people, much as the roads and vehicles that transport them, are easily recognized as infrastructural components. In other cases of analytical purchase, such as law (Pellandini-Simányi and Vargha 2019), this may be more difficult. Can we, for example, draw clear analytical boundaries between immigration legislation as a modular component of connection in its own right and the ongoing interpretations of jurisprudence by frontline immigration officers or judges? 4 Here the distinction between infrastructural components and their mediation is less clear. In this sense, the notion of migration infrastructural assemblage may be less appealing to strictly constructivist approaches to infrastructure but we hope that we thereby contribute an understanding of the mediation of migration that is analytically and conceptually productive and distinct.
To suggest some concluding avenues for future research, let us return to our West African contexts. Our analysis is informed primarily by historical perspectives and our own research prior to the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the escalating security crisis in the Sahel region. Analysis of the development and transformation of infrastructural assemblages following these crises are called for. Are we witnessing a tendency towards infrastructural involution, infrastructural deadlocks, or perhaps further devolution as some infrastructural assemblages are constrained, redirected, and/or bureaucratized in the wake of continued mobility restrictions and deepening inequalities? Will we see an intensification of already existing labor mobilities towards other destinations, such as the Gulf countries, or long-distance destinations in South East Asia or Latin America? How do West African socio-cultural repertoires of improvisation and adventure unfold in encounters with increasingly encapsulating migration infrastructural logics? What are the overall processes of social transformation? These lines of inquiry, we believe, are of utmost importance to the understanding of West African migration today. They illustrate how a migration infrastructure perspective, refined in dialogue with a broader scope of empirical cases and conceptual approaches, enables a research agendum that offers a fresh look at a regional context increasingly approached through its geopolitical role in European externalization policies.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The groundwork for this paper was made during a research stay at the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana in 2019. We thank MIASA for this opportunity and our MIASA fellows for their collaboration and excellent feedback. We also thank colleagues in the Migration and Global Order Research Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), three anonymous peer reviewers, and the editor of International Migration Review for very useful comments and suggestions to previous versions of the paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), grant number 2018-04602.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by two senior fellowship grants from the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA); the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Culture and Communication; and the Vetenskapsrådet (grant number 2018-04602).
