These books differ profoundly in terms of structure and character of the narrative. Whereas the first is a monograph of a mobile anthropologist, the latter is a co-production by a multidisciplinary group of scholars dealing with African asylum cases. Andersson's book aims to understand a whole ‘industry’ binding together a countless number of actors, while Berger and her colleagues share the ambition of discussing the role of one single actor in asylum processes – the expert witness. Despite these differences, the books have more in common than one initially expects.
First and foremost, both books are particularly successful in enhancing our understanding of the logics – and illogics – of migration apparatuses in ‘the North’ that produce the barriers to human mobility that African movers face on their pathways to a better future. With this commonality, the books complement each other in their critique of the way in which human mobility has become a crucial stratifying factor in times of globalization. Second, both readings pay considerable attention to specific encounters in the migration process. Illegality, Inc. discusses the moment when the irregular migrant meets the border guard, and African Asylum at a Crossroads concentrates on the way in which the asylum seeker is confronted with an often surrealist bureaucracy. Both books stress the intertwined roles and ritualized behaviours in these specific scenarios. Andersson portrays ‘a border game’ in which ‘facilitators, migrants, rescue services, guardias, and police have their assigned roles’ (p. 86). Different authors included in African Asylum at a Crossroads point at similar dynamics by framing the asylum process as ‘a performance’ (Hepner) or an ‘asylum dance’ (Berger).
Illegality, Inc. consists of seven chapters divided into three parts: ‘Borderlands’, ‘Crossings’ and ‘Confrontations’. The first part starts in Senegal and presents a development aid-induced ‘food chain’ (p. 52) that links together, in hierarchical order, international institutions, Western NGOs and local initiatives that all share the aim of keeping potential migrants in their place. The book travels on to the headquarters of Frontex (in Warsaw) and the control rooms of the Guardia Civil in order to understand the scattered geography of the border regime and the mixed responsibility of the border actors, which includes ‘reception and rejection, care and coercion’ (p. 72). From there, Andersson outlines the arbitrary practices of subcontracted African forces trying to halt irregular migrants in the Sahel and Maghreb. Part 2, ‘Crossings’, deals with the ritualizations and transformations of different roles in the border spectacle. Andersson shows how the Guardia Civil reinvented itself as humanitarians with their ‘life saving missions at sea’, but he also indicates that the Red Cross faced difficulties in guarding their humanitarian identity as they were seen as ‘the jailer’ of migrants in reception centres. Besides these dynamic roles, there is also the spectacularly visible border itself. Andersson tells the story of the Ceuta and Melilla fences by mirroring the narratives of the West African veterans, who once climbed these hard borders, with the technical hardware and politics that create the fences. ‘Confrontations’ is the last part of this book and starts with migrant lives after the fence. Andersson describes the limbo logics of ‘fake Europe’ (p. 198), whereby the usual practice of transferring migrants to mainland Spain stopped. This occasion produced rather unproductive migrant protests in the Spanish enclaves as they mainly resulted in a public articulation of the migrant as the racialized Other. The section ends with a discussion of the Caravan for Freedom of Movement, moving from Bamako to Dakar in February 2011. With magnificent style, Andersson paints the surreal picture of an improvised collective that moves across a relatively empty African borderland. In fact, this collective posed the same questions that guide this book: how to locate this diffuse migration regime? Who is responsible in this web of subcontracted alliances? Ironically, the collective also asked the same question that was central to the border regime it railed against: namely, how to conjure a certain type of migrant in its border work.
Andersson's ethnography on the absurdity of all this is outstanding in the way he combines the spectacle of the game with the disillusions it produces. These disillusions are found in the stories of the expulsés in Dakar or Bamako, but they are reflected even more in his discussions of the jobless European job centre in Bamako (CIGEM – Centre d'Information et Gestion des Migrations), the empty reception centre on the Canary Islands, and the protest movement without a clear target. For the reader, it is not always easy to follow the different storylines and the sometimes contradictory observations. But this confusion is never tedious; quite the contrary – it is very much the core of his argument that the business of bordering Europe is characterized by its diffusion and contradictions. After all, the primary result of the lucrative system that aims to control illegal migration is that it produces more distressing forms of it. I highly recommend Andersson's work to scholars of migration and borders in Africa and Europe who are interested in how to navigate this industry.
African Asylum at a Crossroads shows that migration processes are not only negotiated at the border, but equally so in immigration courts and during asylum hearings in the United States and Europe. It is a carefully edited book with an introduction, ten chapters and an afterword that really speak to each other. The thought-provoking introduction frames the role of the expert in an overall climate of suspicion and argues that asylum processes are not reducible to legal procedures, as they also include social, political and cultural processes. In Chapter 1, Tague re-thinks the popular image of refugees as burdens by showing how Mozambican refugees were approached by Nyerere's Tanzania as development opportunities. Terretta (Chapter 2) relates Cameroonian asylum cases to global economic injustices and radically inverts the image of the ‘fraudulent asylum seeker’ into that of a ‘transnational reformer of asylum protocols’ (p. 70). Chapter 3, by Musalo, outlines how asylum procedures evolved in terms of processing and how this has changed the requested expert knowledge in asylum cases. In Chapter 4, Campbell provides a detailed description of the ‘labyrinthine nature’ (p. 103) of asylum legislation and uses cases of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees in the UK to point to a semblance of legal stability in asylum decisions. The subsequent five chapters all discuss the tension between complex asylum narratives, on the one hand, and the need for ‘legally effective’ stories (p. 125), on the other. In this context, McDougall (Chapter 5) discusses the role of metanarratives that seriously simplify cases of Mauritanian asylum seekers. Bohmer and Shuman (Chapter 6) point to the cultural silences involved and argue that the genre of interrogation always does violence to the personal narrative. Berger (Chapter 7) stresses that asylum attorneys need to learn to make better sense of African narratives that may follow non-linear trajectories. Luongo (Chapter 8) states that immigration authorities have to deal with a ‘standardized culture of disbelief’ (p. 191) in cases related to witchcraft. Walker-Said's (Chapter 9) focus is on how the multiple identities of individuals belonging to sexual minorities are ignored, and she pleads for the prevention of blueprint thoughts regarding what individual identities look like. By zooming out from the issue of the asylum story, Hepner (Chapter 10) provides an excellent analytical closure with, among other elements, her conceptualization of asylum as a form of agency. Finally, in his afterword, Ngom addresses the problematic involvement of private actors providing linguistic services to determine the country or region of origin of asylum seekers.
Although African Asylum at a Crossroads repeats the importance of ‘crafting complex asylum narratives’ in several chapters, and although it provides limited insights into local differences in asylum procedures, it forms an original and varied source of asylum dances. Its main value consists in three threads: it provides a unique insider perspective on the bureaucratic logics of asylum; it provides first-hand evidence for the often-heard argument that the political and economic dimensions of African migration are extremely difficult to disentangle; and it critically enhances the debate on what engaged scholarship is and does. These three threads form an intellectually inspiring crossroads for every scholar interested in African asylum or legal anthropology.
