The Rise of Crimefare Europe: Fighting Migrant Smuggling in West Africa

This article explores the incremental role of criminalization and crime control in European Union (EU) foreign policy and external action. Protecting Europe from dangerous or unwanted mobility has come to drive the EU’s relations with Africa. Consequently, the EU’s liberal state-building agenda (promoting peace, democracy and human rights) seems to be increasingly accompanied or even sometimes supplanted by illiberal practices (criminalization, policing, surveillance, border security and militarization). Based on fieldwork in Niger, Mali and Senegal, the article investigates how West African countries’ internal security apparatuses and borders are increasingly becoming a main target sector for European assistance. Yet scrutinizing policy implementation reveals that some European crime definitions and control models are locally resisted and contribute to greater insecurity by upsetting fragile micro-political stability. As such, the article problematizes the compatibility of European and African security, and argues for a collaborative engagement between Criminology and International Relations (IR) in analysing the EU’s emerging global crime-fighting role.