Description
How does the EU's integrated approach to external border management influence its interactions with local actors? As the EU's dominant framework for crisis management, the integrated approach has received little scholarly attention in the context of migration control. This paper investigates this using Mali and Niger as case studies, states that are increasingly securitised by the EU due to their limited statehood and 'irregular' migration patterns that bring illegal migrants and refugees towards Europe. The EU's primary pragmatic goal in the region of migration control relies on local actors, as it must build the capacity of local state border agents to secure its own borders in turn. However, the integrated approach framework fundamentally undermines this through its fixation on operational streamlining that ignores local security realities. Through analysis of its case studies in the Sahel, the paper argues that the integrated approach framework is used to avoid ontological engagement with complex local realities. The projection of the EU's border anxiety onto local systems of governance (re)produces a top-down prescriptive approach to crisis management in which local people have no agency or ownership.
