The Bioeconomy of Sahel Borders: Informal Practices of Revenue and Data Extraction

As recent work in border studies has argued, EU-border externalisation is often achieved by exporting technocratic management templates and advanced surveillance technologies, prompting scholars to adopt the lens of biopolitics in studying borderwork. Outside of Europe, however, the paucity of resources and vastness of spaces mean that indigenous forms of agency continue to be a key factor of border governance. Focusing on everyday practices illuminated by ethnographic fieldwork, this article investigates EU border externalisation’s encounter with the Sahelian context. It argues that state and non-state actors form, deform and perform borders by extracting and capturing the material (economic) and immaterial (cognitive) resources that pass through liminal spaces. These dynamics shape a biopolitical economy of border control in which features of exceptionality, sovereignty and politics seem less compelling that those pertaining to the sphere of ordinary, hybridity and economy.