The externalized European “migration management” in West Africa has technologically modernized and militarized border posts. This threatens visa-free travel, freedom of settlement and borderland economies in parts of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). It has interrupted historical mobility patterns, depleted the diversity of mobility practices and criminalized regional economies. At the same time, one can observe intensified and asymmetrical violent conflict in some of these borderlands. By taking the Kantchari-Makalondi borderland as a case study we analysed the relations between migration policies, insecurity, forced immobility and economic decline. Our observations and interviews with migrants, traders, security forces and borderlanders lead us to question conventional narratives on border control and African mobilities as a binary relation between Africa and Europe. Instead, they foreground the multiple practices of (im)mobility in these spaces: the circulation and blockage of travelers, merchandise, surveillance technologies, and military interventions and their impact on security and livelihoods.
