ECAS 2013

Abstract

The paper relates a borderland of a particular kind: the Bijagós-archipelago off the coast of the tiny West-African country Guinea-Bissau. In contrast to popular opinion, depicting the islands as a last paradise unspoiled and untouched by the consequences of modernity, the Bijagós actually are a hot spot of globalization. Numerous "global players" are present on the islands: operators of the global tourist industry, international drug dealers, fishermen from West-African countries, industrial fish trawlers from Asia and Europe, petrol companies, as well as transnational environmental organisations.

Following Vigh's argument who describes Guinea-Bissau as a façade state (William Reno), state structures, including state borders, do not serve the country's population but almost exclusively the interests of its elites. Instead of hardening state borders, Guinea-Bissau's elites have opened the country to various actors and activities, not least illicit ones.

All newcomers seek to obtain specific rights to access the islands' resources, be it oil, fishing grounds, beaches, biospheres, or hiding places. The confrontation of autochthonous norms with allochthonous conceptions affects morally protected boundaries between various spheres of exchange, leading to crises of trust, misunderstandings and mutual accusation of immorality. On the archipelago, local groups actively cope with these challenges by alliances and conflicts with allochthonous groups most of which are short living. At the same time there are claims for the re-establishment of "neo-traditional" rights on land and fishing grounds, which are not only directed against newcomers, but are also prone to bring about changes within the age-class society of the Bijagós.

Maritime borderland management is everyday challenged by the increasing mobility of individuals and small groups in West Africa. As a response to the decrease of natural resources in their ocean, Senegalese fishermen have spread their mobility at the regional level. Since the beginning of the 80s, a number of them have organised fishing trips to neighbouring countries' waters in order to find high-market value fish species. No longer able to provide decent livelihoods to their family, some of them also crossed the ocean and illegally reached Europe via the Canary Islands over the last decade.

Based on field interviews in Senegal, this paper examines the different meanings and values given to the notions of security and mobility, exploring the multiple maritime border experiences of migrant-fishermen in the Atlantic. Whether they escape border controls or illegally fish in protected areas, migrant-fishermen develop particular navigation strategies that constantly reshape West African maritime borderlands.

For each migration scenario, fishermen' mobility has paradoxically become both a security strategy for coastal communities and a potential threat to the national security of destination countries. For fishermen, securing livelihoods either involves looking for resourceful places in neighbouring countries or organising a migration project to Europe. For institutional actors, this illegal mobility legitimates the strengthening of border controls in order to protect their natural resources and/or national security. Migrant-fishermen' mobility carries distinct meanings and generates power struggles that give to this global maritime borderland a blurred shape which outline seems to be endlessly negotiated.

The major seaports of West Africa take centre stage in debates on the region's economic future. As strategic places of connection between the global North and the global South, their role is increasingly being negotiated in a geoeconomic rationale of interconnectivity among international organisations, national governments and firms: Interruption in one node is said to lead to interruption in adjacent nodes. Therefore, any interruption - whether through state actors at a national border or through pilfering, smuggling or terrorist activities - is calculated as a security risk to 'circulatory capitalism'. In contrast to past geopolitical discourses on anarchical spaces in an unruly world, it is now particularly the facilitation of 'legitimate' flows which comes to the fore.

In the sense of a critical geography of logistics, our contribution investigates logistical calculations and practices for stabilising containerised circuits. Against the backdrop of an ethnographic view from Tema port in Ghana, one of the biggest nodes for container traffic in West Africa, we trace practices of interconnection and explore how the micro-physics of governing maritime frontiers produce forms of situated geopower. Thus, we plead for a relational-materialist perspective, highlighting the diverse ways of standardising, connecting and sanitising engrained in such processes. From international codes and standards to specific control practices within port areas such as the collection of biometric data of employees or the installation of X-ray container scanners, manifold translocally linked and seemingly mundane technologies are now applied in order to address the problematised state of interconnection.

The South Atlantic is becoming a strategic space in terms of development. The sea usage on both shores of the Ocean allows the exploitation and the use, as well as the conservation and the management of the natural resources of the seabed and the subsoil. The guarantee of economic rights, with the counterpart of duties and responsibilities of political nature, environmental and of public security, reflects the possibility of control over and area rich in natural resources and that, at the same time, becomes vulnerable to international pressures of all kinds. The research objectives are: a) analyze the geo-economics importance of the Ocean due the increasing exploitation of this space; b) analyze the new geopolitical reality, because the South Atlantic was converted into a strategic route of passage and development pole; and, c) analyze its geostrategic relevance by establishing a connection with Asia via Indian Ocean, highlighting the role of South Africa and IBSA.

Since 2008, the intensification of piracy attacks off the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden triggered a massive scale experiment in the Horn of Africa's maritime domain. The anti-piracy multiple initiatives have had as its most immediate consequence the securitization of the region's maritime space. The Horn of Africa countries do not prioritise anti-piracy as international actors. For the coastal states of the region, and for Somalia in particular, the key concern is illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, as well as the dumping of illegal toxic waste. The overall impact of piracy for the domestic fisheries sector in Somalia and the wider Indian Ocean space affected by piracy off Somalia coast remains under-researched. Moreover, only recently have international actors sought to implement measures to mitigate the effects of piracy for fisheries in the Western Indian Ocean.

The EU under the Common Security and Defence Policy and under the European Bureau for Conservation and Development is tackling piracy and its impact on fisheries.

The key question of this paper is how EU initiatives in the security sector mitigate the effects of piracy for groups with maritime-dependent livelihoods? How do these initiatives contemplate long-term alternatives for those who engage in criminal activities linked to piracy? The paper aims to understand to what extent the EU initiatives for supporting the security sector reform in Somalia's maritime domain go beyond coastal guards training and law enforcement and take into account the support for Somalia's maritime activities as a long-term anti-piracy strategy.