Description
Ever since the coming and going of ‘migrant crises’ at Europe’s borders, the EU and its member states have sought to control international migration flows. Yet whereas initiatives to stymie large inflows of migrants at Europe’s outer borders continue to attract widespread attention, the EU’s own efforts to manage the root causes of ‘irregular migration’ in Europe’s frontiers remain underexplored. One example of how the EU, aiming to tackle ‘the drivers of irregular migration’ from Africa, has tried to contain Europe’s African frontiers can be found in the shape of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF).
This paper examines the EU’s ‘development aid as migration control’ approach by zooming in on one of the EUTF-funded projects in Gambella, a regional state nestled between the borders of Ethiopia and South Sudan. Relying on interviews with 21 stakeholders involved with the project in question, I show that managing Ethiopian frontiers to stem the tide of migration is anything but a straightforward undertaking. Comparing and contrasting the relationship between the European Union as ‘project initiator’ and NGO’s as ‘implementing partners’, it transpires the relationship between the two is complex, messy, and multidimensional. Within this context, I argue that European efforts to control African frontier spaces are not to be viewed as top-down or unidirectional. Rather, managing migratory frontiers is a multidirectional affair, seldom yielding unambiguous or ‘satisfactory’ outcomes.
