Mediating Mobility in West Africa: Improvisation,Culture,and Volatility in Migration Infrastructures

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.

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).

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.