EU Cooperation and Migration Policy Development in West Africa

European policy-makers have, since the early 2000s, increasingly turned to cooperation with so-called migrant-sending and transit countries as a migration management recipe (Boswell 2003; Lavenex 2006). Scholars have scrutinised the instruments used in the external dimension of the EU’s and member-states migration policy, id est readmission agreements (Apedoju et al, 2009; Cassarino, 2007, …), ‘mobility partnerships’ (Reslow and Vink, 2015), informal ‘regional consultative processes’ on migration (Thouez and Channac, 2006) and informal cooperation on return through memoranda of understanding, pacts and police cooperation amongst others (Cassarino, 2010; El Quadim 2014). However, this growing body of research focus very little, or only indirectly, on the perspective and agency of migrant-sending countries in the Global South and the impact of the EU cooperation schemes on migrant-sending countries. This paper tries to address this double research gap by showing how EU migration cooperation impacts differently upon the regulation of migration in two West-African countries, Ghana and Senegal. The paper explains the differentiated impact by the varying degrees of politicization of migration within Ghana and Senegal, the different postcolonial ties and divergent interests of both countries in the internal regulation of migration.