(Re)Doing Asylum in Externalization Policies: The Case of Niger
Laura Lambert
My PhD project looks ethnographically at the (re)configurations of asylum and refugee protection in Niger, which are tightly linked to EU externalization of migration control and refugee protection. During a 13-month period of ethnographic fieldwork in Niamey and Agadez in 2018‒2019, I conducted research among a variety of actors within the asylum regime – notably, asylum seekers and migrants, state bureaucrats, and UNHCR agents – and looked at their everyday practices, experiences, and strategies. In my dissertation I analyse how this constellation of actors, with their respective intentions, laws, regulations, and policies, are remaking the Nigerien state in asylum matters and beyond. I try to understand the resulting shifts and consequences of this everyday making of externalization by approaching it from five different angles: asylum-seekers and refugees’ decision-making whether they should stay, go back to their home countries, or travel on; changes within the Nigerien asylum street-level bureaucracy related to the increased flow of money, partners, and asylum-seekers; the asylum decision-making in the national eligibility commission; the highly politicized Emergency Transit Mechanism as an evacuation program for refugees detained in Libya; and the local moral and political negotiations surrounding some 2,000 Sudanese refugees in Agadez. As these five angles suggest, the remaking of the Nigerien asylum system in the wake of the EU externalization of migration control and refugee protection has yielded unintended consequences on the ground. These include a perceived loss of power on the part of state asylum bureaucrats as the UNHCR, the EU, and local anti-refugee mobilizations are granted greater influence; a potential “Europeanization” of the asylum procedure limiting the influence of local state and societal norms; and fractured trajectories of refugees often experiencing difficult protection and livelihood situations and seeking to remigrate, in violation of EU externalization policies.
Duration
2017 - 2022
Funding
International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment
Supervisor
Prof. Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets
Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker