Abstract

The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and focuses on the process of externalization of the European Union’s borders in Niger. While the «securitarian » dimension of European-sponsored policies to tackle irregular migration is well explored in the literature, here I consider Niger as a new space of humanitarian governance of migration, examining the role of UN agencies. In particular, the article turns its attention to the borderwork of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), showing how the intertwining of the need to counter irregular migration and the imperative to save lives has generated new practices of interdiction that increasingly merge the dimensions of aid and control. In this reconfiguration, the IOM’s humanitarian interventions – search and rescue operations as well as assisted voluntary returns to countries of origin – are an essential part of the system of surveillance and repression of mobility towards North Africa and the European continent