Hard Borders and Weak Safeguards: Frontex as an Agent of Expansive Externalisation - Navigating a Changing Reality in the Sahel

In the last four years, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, has been heavily scrutinised for human rights violations at the EU's external borders. Frontex’s activities in the Aegean Sea have been the subject of sustained media, political, and legal attention for their proximity to, and complicity with, violations of the prohibition of collective expulsion and other fundamental rights. However, the agency’s work outside EU borders has yet to receive equivalent attention from legislative, journalistic and political scrutiny, even though Frontex is a leading actor in the process of externalisation of EU migration management, creating a pre-border buffer zone. In this presentation, we draw upon our research, including fieldwork in Mali and Niger, on the legal implications of EU migration policies on the Sahel region. This research seeks to update the scholarship on the EU’s externalised border project and Frontex’s role in it through a present-day focus on Mali and Niger, shedding light also on developments in Senegal and Mauritania. The research examines Frontex’s activity in terms of its human rights accountability and its place in the continuation of colonial dynamics by European actors in West Africa. This paper seeks to explore how the constraint of mobility via EU policies and the work of Frontex in and with third countries can lead to the re-formation of the Sahel region in accordance with European objectives and legal norms. In this regard, it also considers local resistance and cooperation, as this reformation depends on the interplay between European strategies and local agency. It discusses the externalisation of the EU's borders via the work of Frontex, mainly focusing on Mali and Niger, while also looking into the future Frontex border surveillance operations in Senegal and Mauritania. We describe the context in which the agency conducts its work and investigate the potential impact upon accountability for human rights violations. Through this framework, we analyse Frontex's activity in the Sahel countries concerning their political priorities and economic development goals from a postcolonial perspective. We see Frontex scoping and joint operational activities as indicators of attempted and future EU externalisation policy, in which the role of the agency is envisaged even stronger. We set this alongside existing deficiencies in Frontex’s fundamental rights compliance and accountability. Taken together, we warn of a situation of higher risks for fundamental rights, with fewer accountability safeguards. Finally, the elusive accountability of Frontex is considered alongside its role in the continuation of colonial dynamics. Imperialism is already a root cause of global migration. Now, the management of migration is also becoming a means of maintaining imperial relationships, with migrants and third-country residents caught in the middle. As remarked by Harsha Walia, ‘next to economic dependency and domination, we can also add the soft power of migration diplomacy pillars in the maintenance of a colonial present.’ This paper uses this conceptual framing of neo-colonial approaches to border policies in Africa to approach questions of accountability deficits and inadequate safeguards in Frontex’s implementation of EU border management.