Mobility in the margins: Legal borderlands and the governance of cross-border mobility in West Africa

This paper explores how cross-border mobility is governed at the legal and institutional margins of West African states. These borderlands lie at the intersection of overlapping regulatory regimes and normative orders, including national migration law, ECOWAS free movement protocols, and local mobility norms. Departing from conventional approaches that focus on formal state institutions and migration policy, the paper adopts the lens of legal borderlands to examine how mobility is shaped by plural, informal, and often contradictory governance practices at the edge of state authority. Borderland studies have often depicted these areas as “lawless” zones where movement is structured primarily through social networks. Yet West African borderlands are far from legal voids. Rather, they are legally saturated environments where governance is enacted through the everyday practices of immigration officers, traders, brokers, smugglers, and migrants. Law in these contexts is not simply imposed from above, but constantly negotiated, adapted, and contested through local interactions that both reinforce and undermine formal governance frameworks. Based on ethnographic research, including interviews, focus groups, observations, and informal interactions, conducted between October 2024 and May 2025 at Elubo (Ghana–Côte d’Ivoire), Aflao (Ghana–Togo), and Akanu-Noepé (Ghana–Togo), the paper unpacks the complexity of legality and illegality in cross-border mobility governance in West African borderlands. At Elubo, overlapping jurisdictions and the Tano River generate complex assemblages of regulation and circumvention. At Aflao and Akanu-Noepé, formal ECOWAS protocols coexist with informal brokerage and document negotiation, blurring legal boundaries. Across these sites, non-state and local actors play a constitutive role in shaping mobility trajectories – often without being formally recognised as part of official migration governance. By advancing the concept of legal borderlands, the paper unpacks situated practices of everyday migration governance and shows how cross-border mobility in West African borderlands is co-produced through everyday interactions in legally plural and institutionally fragmented spaces at the margins of the state.