Migrants Sahara-Sahel Region

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Thousands of people in the Sahara-Sahel region have freely opted to migrate or/and have been forced into migration due to many factors including socio-economic deprivation, wars and conflicts, militarization and empire, environmental factors, among many others. This course seeks to provide an introduction to the transnational migration in what has been coined as “Europe’s Frontier Zone” or “Europe African borders” by highlighting the drivers behind people’s decisions to move from one place to another. Needless to say, human mobility has become one of the most politicized issues of our time as the tension between mobility and containment is a central feature both globally and across the Sahara-Sahel region. The latter has become a key area of externalization and securitization of the European Union’s border control mechanisms. In this regard, the course surveys some of the challenges and opportunities associated with human mobility across regional borders, including but not limited to the role played by individual-level factors, networks, ethnicity, race, gender, class, states in influencing the migration processes and managing immigration through politics of border control (e.g., detention, deportation policy, border surveillance and policing, documentation, production of “illegality” and irregularization), asylum-seekers and refugees, role of racial, religious and linguistic diversity generated by migratory flows and their implications for people’s behavior toward migrants in transit and destination countries. The course also critically discusses and assesses the role and responsibility of international institutions such as the UNHCR, IOM, and other NGOs/organizations in dealing with migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. The core texts/literature for the course are selected from critical migration scholarship across different disciplines and sites of knowledge production. The goal of this curriculum is to provide an interdisciplinary framework for teaching and learning.