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DTSTART:20260413T160000Z
DTEND:20260413T173000Z
SUMMARY:EU’s migration governance through rentierism: when refugee commodification becomes a threat to human security in Africa.
A talk by Bahlbi Y. Malk, Ph.D.
DESCRIPTION:Sub-Saharan African states host a significant percentage of the world’s refugees, leading to widespread commendation for their generosity, hospitality, and progressive refugee policy. While numerous states in the region are recognized for accommodating and generating refugees, the overwhelming majority of refugees remain within the continent. This, nonetheless, fails to encapsulate the entirety of the narrative on how the presence of refugees within their territories has been exploited, commodified, weaponized and monetized, leading to corruption, violence, abuse and displacement. This article discusses the ramifications of the biopolitics of regionalization, encampment, and the humanitarianization of containment policies in Sudan that weaponize time and place and commodify refugees, thereby positioning vulnerable people within the biopolitical space of exception and outside the boundaries of protection, legality, humanity, and belonging. It discusses how the refugee camps, as “zones of exception,” have exposed refugees to systemic negligence, security vulnerability, and violence.  It investigates how the permanent space of exception has created a legal, political, security and strategic vacuum that has been filled by illegal mobility operatives that emerged as security threats to refugees and survival tools for refugees to escape the debilitating circumstances of (im) mobility, insecurity, illegality, and irregularity. The EU’s externalization of migration governance, securitization, and restriction of mobility, on the other hand, prioritized spatial blockages, deterrence, obstruction and immobility over refugees’ rights to life, liberty, security and protection that it outsourced it biopolitical governance of mobility to authoritarian regimes that represent imminent threats to their own citizens. Thus, they are forming migratory governance, bilateralization, and multilateralization that supply financial resources and surveillance technologies to the regimes that lack the rule of law, financial and legal oversight for their migration and border (mis) governance practices. This led to the emergence of new political dynamics, attitudes, approaches, and economic rent-seeking behaviors, which facilitate extractive migration governance strategies that treat refugees as commodities for negotiation and trade, leveraging humanitarian crises to obtain political and financial concessions from donors and international organizations. This has maintained the status quo, legitimized and emboldened rentier states to remain one of the primary causes of insecurity and displacements. Against this background and from a human security perspective, this article investigates how some rent-seeking hosts are commodifying refugees and asylum-seekers under the pretext of bilateral and multilateral cooperation to combat EU-bound irregular migration that ultimately reinforces the violent biopolitics of contemporary migration regimes.



About the speaker: Bahlbi Malk is a research scholar and international development practitioner who works at the intersection of migration, human security, governance, and development, with a particular emphasis on fragile and conflict-affected societies in Africa. Bahlbi did his graduate studies in international development at Dalhousie University. Building on his post-graduate research in post-war recovery studies at the University of York, he subsequently completed a Ph.D. in law and politics at the University of Graz, Faculty of Law. His PhD dissertation, titled “No-exit and no-entry border politics: when emigration, immigration, and repatriation are equally dangerous to human security,” investigates the home, host and donor states’ (in)actions, behaviors, policies, and practices that placed forced migrants and refugee camps outside the legal framework and within the biopolitical space of exception that legitimized abandonment and commodification, and normalization of hierarchies of suffering.
LOCATION:2420R Richcraft Hall, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Dr, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6
URL:
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