Between Resistance and Instrumentalization: The Role of Civil Society in Senegal’s Migration Policymaking

Abstract

This article examines how a heterogeneous group of Senegalese civil society organizations (CSOs) attempted to reshape Senegal’s migration policy agenda. By analysing a policy process in which they (with support from the German Heinrich Böll Foundation) engaged, we trace how CSOs mobilized to push the government towards adopting a more decolonial national migration policy centred on sovereignty, national and regional interests, as well as migrants’ rights, rather than European containment objectives. We examine the conflicting interests among the CSOs and the role of German Heinrich Böll Foundation that supported them as well as European funding and agenda-setting. We argue that, ultimately, the structural, donor-driven migration governance landscape offered only limited and largely superficial political space to recentre the migration debate. Instead, CSOs once again became instrumentalized in performative, participatory roles—commenting on the national migration policy without fundamentally altering its trajectory.