INTRODUCTION: FIGURES, STRATEGIES AND EXPECTATIONS ABOUT MIGRATION UPSTREAM OF THE CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN ROUTE

While irregular migratory flows from Africa to Europe represent a longstanding phenomenon, in recent times the exponential increase in numbers crossing through the Central Mediterranean Route (CMR) connecting North Africa to Italy have attracted considerable media attention, as well as numerous policy initiatives.Footnote ¹ According to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (also known as Frontex), the total number of migrants (including asylum seekers and victims of trafficking) arriving on Italy's shores and ports in 2013 was about 40,000; this figure climbed sharply to 170,000 in 2014, slightly declined to about 154,000 in 2015, and peaked to more than 181,000 in 2016 (Frontex 2017). During the first half of 2017, the number of migrants reaching Italy was reportedly 15% higher compared with the same period in 2016 (Il Sole 24 Ore 2017 ).Footnote ²

These figures stimulated a large number of studies, including reports and scholarly works, dealing with different aspects of migration across the Mediterranean (see International Organization of Migration 2014; Toaldo Reference Toaldo2015; UNHCR 2015). The countries of origin of migrants using the CMR point to the significance of migratory patterns originating well away from the Mediterranean shores, namely across Africa. The top three nationalities arriving in Italy along the CMR in 2014 were Syrians (42,000), Eritreans (34,000) and Malians (10,000); in 2015 they were Eritreans (39,000), Nigerians (20,000) and Somalis (12,000); and in 2016 Nigerians (37,000), Eritreans (20,000) and Guineans (13,000) (Ministero dell‘Interno 2016; UNHCR 2017). These figures confirm the fact that migratory flows from Sub-Saharan Africa towards Europe have been growing steadily in the last few years. To date however, little is known about them (International Organization of Migration 2014; Danish Refugee Council 2016).

While the majority of the flows converge towards a handful of embarkation points in North Africa, the pathways connecting these embarkation sites to Africa's hinterland amount less to a single identifiable ‘route’ than to a collection of trails that are subject to constant negotiation and change. As a result, the available literature has more frequently focused on specific segments of this trajectory, with only a limited temporal or spatial link to the CMR (Scheele Reference Scheele2012; Andersson Reference Andersson2014). This article aims to address this gap, by focusing on one of the main hubs of migration that has emerged: Niger, and specifically the region of Agadez. Before branching into the CMR in the north of Libya, the number of migrants transiting here has risen considerably: while they were estimated at 40–60,000 in the early 2010s (UNODC 2011), in 2016 they reportedly surpassed 250,000 (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). According to the International Organization for Migrations (IOM), more than half of the migrants who had reached Lampedusa passed through Agadez (Tinti & Westcott Reference Tinti and Westcott2016).

As a result, since early 2015 migratory flows from Niger to Europe have been increasingly securitised (Buzan et al. Reference Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde1998), especially because of their alleged nexus with non-conventional security threats, such as transnational criminal cartels and jihadist terrorist groups. When, on 19 April 2015, a major shipwreck occurred along the CMR, leading to the death of at least 800 migrants and asylum seekers (The Guardian 2015), the EU took action with a series of aggressive initiatives aimed at clamping down on irregular migration (Council of the European Union 2015). In the subsequent months, existing European missions in the area were refocused and expanded with a view to fighting irregular migration. The Frontex mission Triton, which had been in place since November 2014, was enhanced with the aim to monitor and protect European borders. Similarly, the mandate and resources of the CSDP-mission EUCAP Sahel Niger, which had been operating in Niamey since 2012, were also adjusted so that the mission could help Nigerien security forces ensure a better control of irregular migration. The EU urged the government of Niamey to adopt a new law (number 36/2015) criminalising human smuggling, broadly encompassing – in line with international conventions – all forms of support to facilitate the crossing of an international border without legal authorisation and in exchange for profit. The law imposed severe penalties on smugglers – including imprisonment, confiscation of property and removal from public office – and was approved in the subsequent months with little discussion and ‘under a tremendous political pressure’Footnote ³ (NN 2015 Int.). In June 2015, the EU Council authorised a new CSDP-mission, European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR Med), also known as Operation Sophia, whereby a taskforce of European navies was mandated to contribute to disrupting the business model of trafficking networks. Lastly, in February 2016 the EU Council relaunched the CSDP-mission EU Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM Libya), which had been in abeyance for the previous 20 months, to support Libyan authorities in developing border management and security capacity, including in the south of the country (Toaldo Reference Toaldo2015; Van der Lijn Reference Van der Lijn2017).

The scale of the initiatives launched by the EU since early 2015 to fight irregular migration along the CMR has been unprecedented. Yet, from a qualitative point of view, the militarisation of border controls and the criminalisation of cross-border practices hardly represents a departure from the EU's conventional approaches to the issue, especially with regard to Africa. Throughout the last decade, in fact, the EU has applied a similar formula to migratory ‘crises’ in Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, and Niger itself. This was the case, for instance, in 2013, when the discovery of the bodies of 92 Sub-Saharan migrants in the Sahara prompted the European Union to urge the government of Niger to clamp down on irregular migration; all the locations where irregular migrants were encamped in Agadez – the so-called ghettoes – were subsequently reportedly closed in a single day.

It was therefore legitimate to expect that the outcomes of these new measures in Niger would be analogous to the ones resulting from previous experiences and observed in previous studies (for instance Brachet et al. Reference Brachet, Choplin and Pliez2011; Schapendonk Reference Schapendonk2012; UNODC 2013; Andersson Reference Andersson2014; Lewis Reference Lewis2014), particularly in terms of (1) a steady (albeit potentially provisional) reduction of migratory flows and irregular crossings on the routes where controls were hardened; (2) the need for existing ‘homespun’ smuggling networks to undergo a process of criminal professionalisation to circumvent the newly set controls and react to the raised entry barrier in the illegal(-ised) market; and (3) increasing costs (both economic and personal) incurred by irregular migrants in parallel to increasing profits (criminalised) by service providers to ensure a safe passage amidst increasing obstacles. That this was the calculus which inspired EU strategies to fight irregular migration across the Sahara Desert was plainly recognised by a EU officer:

Initial observations seemed to confirm that these expected outcomes were materialising along the migratory routes north of Agadez, thereby confirming that the rationale behind the European strategy, albeit morally questionable, was technically correct. IOM data reported that the number of migrants’ crossings from Agadez were declining, especially since late 2016, and reached a historic low in November that year, when only 1,525 migrants in transit were monitored in the north of Niger (International Organization of Migration 2016b ). Moreover, policy reports and police investigations suggested that, indeed, smuggling networks operating in the Saharan region, while previously loosely organised (UNODC 2011; International Organization of Migration 2014), were increasingly featuring all the attributes of transnationally organised criminal cartels, including centralisation, hierarchical consolidation and the resort to armed violence (Reitano Reference Reitano2015; Sahan/IGAD 2016). Arguably, and in line with the expectations of European authorities, one could attribute these transformations to the greater costs of migration generated by EU policies, which in turn ensured increasing profits to smugglers.

In spite of sensationalistic media reports and policymakers’ claims, however, extralegal markets are inherently opaque phenomena. Clandestine operations undermine the reliability of existing datasets, all the more so in fragile African states, whose capacity – and willingness – to collect, store and report accurate information of undocumented activities in unmonitored remote regions is questionable (Shaw & Reitano Reference Shaw and Reitano2013). The critical circumspection vis-à-vis existing quantitative datasets highlights the need to pay a greater attention to fine-grained qualitative evidence. Only fieldwork can capture the key dynamics of extralegal phenomena i.e. the grey areas, including both the criminal and the informal (Polese et al. Reference Polese, Russo and Strazzari2018).

Aiming to provide a more nuanced, context-sensitive account of the dynamics of human smuggling across Niger, this article mobilises primary data collected in the region (Niger, Mali, Senegal) during several weeks of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017.Footnote ⁴ This included interviews with smugglers, national and international NGOs, EU migration officers, Nigerien national and regional authorities, and Nigerien security forces;Footnote ⁵ a few focus groups with Nigerien youths from northern regions with high rates of mobility;Footnote ⁶ and participant observations recorded during different journeys using public transport along some major migratory routes of the Sahel.Footnote ⁷ The treatment of these pieces of evidence builds on the methodologies put forward by Shaw & Kemp (Reference Shaw and Kemp2012) and by Snyder & Duran-Martinez (Reference Snyder and Duran-Martinez2009) for the analysis of extralegal markets and the relation of the latter to social orders in fragile contexts. I hypothesise that human smuggling in Niger takes place in the framework of a state-sponsored protection racket, which has brought about the de facto regularisation of smuggling. Within this framework, contradictory security imperatives at national and international levels have seriously undermined the impact of externally sponsored prohibition regimes (Andreas & Nadelmann Reference Andreas and Nadelmann2006) designed to fight irregular migration, whose repressive measures have not yielded the expected results.

SOMETHING WENT WRONG: AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO DETECT THE DESERT SAND INFILTRATING THE GEARS OF BORDER POLICIES

The impression that migratory trends in Niger were matching the expectations of European strategies proved short-lived. It soon turned out that the EU's enthusiasm about the sharp decline in migrants crossing Niger towards Libya was based on inaccurate data, including banal miscalculations (Siegfried Reference Siegfried2017). It should also be emphasised that the IOM had acknowledged the limits of its own methodology of data collection, to the point that an explicit disclaimer was added to its periodic reports: ‘This data does not reflect overall entries or exits to and from Niger. … With increased security controls in the towns of Séguédine and Arlit, it is clear from discussions with migrants that new and or alternative routes are being used more’ (International Organization of Migration 2016b ). Indeed, well into 2017, IOM officers interviewing migrants upon their arrival in Italy confirmed that the largest majority of them claimed to have passed through Niger (SF 2017 Int.). While EU authorities refused to rectify their previous triumphant claims, in private EU officers have recognised that ‘available figures and soaring transits along the CMR suggest that flows have only been displaced, not curbed. This is an inescapable conclusion which all those who spent time in the south [of Libya] agree with’ (PF 2017 int.).

An additional indicator that the actual dynamics of human smuggling in Niger were diverging from EU expectations was the fact that, despite the adoption of repressive measures, smuggling cartels did not seem to feel the urge to step up to a more organised structure and enhanced criminal professionalisation (see also Campana Reference Campana2017). Prior to the EU's engagement with Niger on migration policies, a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime noted that ‘the assistance provided to Sub-Saharan African migrants had been small-scale, focused on a single border or short leg of the journey which had to be paid for separately’ (UNODC 2011: 35). While ‘durable partnerships’ among different service providers were still possible, the prevalence of horizontal and porous dynamics of coordination significantly undermined the claims of a major involvement of criminal syndicates in the organisation of clandestine migrations across the Sahara, and in Niger in particular. In spite of the alarmist claims of police agencies and ‘securocrats’ worldwide, however, local observers emphasise that little had changed. Civil society organisations (CSOs) from Niamey working on migrants’ rights have maintained that: ‘people rely on bottom-up, flexible agreements, not on packaged options provided for by hierarchical organizations’ (TB 2015 Int.); ‘the smuggling is not supervised by a criminal organisation. What one can find are self-employed smugglers [passeurs], or private individuals providing different sorts of service, including accommodation, food, transport or jobs’ (CN 2015 Int.). This view is shared by virtually all the sources interviewed for the present research. According to a professor of human geography at the University of Niamey, who has been researching extensively on migration in the country, ‘smuggling networks might be well-knit, but they do not feature a real hierarchical organisation. These are mainly arrangements between actors on the ground’ (HM 2016 Int.). Interestingly, a senior smuggler from Agadez confirmed that: ‘we mainly work on the basis of occasional agreements, including part-time. Anyone can be a smuggler for some time; you just bring your own car, and then leave with no fear of reprisals whatsoever’ (BT 2016 Int.). A criminal prosecutor in Niamey, entrusted to fight organised crime, highlighted that ‘the offence of organised crime is very hard to substantiate in Niger, because people feature multiple affiliations, and the life-long subordination to a semi-secret gang, or syndicate, is often lacking’ (KP 2015 Int.).

The expectation that the European-sponsored repression of irregular migration in Niger would push local smugglers to convert into organised criminal cartels does not stand empirical scrutiny, as subsequent reports have increasingly confirmed (Tinti & Westcott Reference Tinti and Westcott2016; Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). Instead, many sources emphasised that, when it comes to migration, the most systematic and best organised racket is the one performed by Nigerien security forces.Footnote ⁸ Again, this finding reiterates the fundamental continuity of the practices shaping the field of migration across Niger, both before (UNODC 2011) and after (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017) Niamey's formal adoption of a much more repressive stance in 2015. At the entrance of every village on the way to Agadez, checkpoints manned by different security forces (including the national police, customs and the gendarmerie) force migrants to disembark. ‘Informal’ fees are then levied, the amount of which varies between $1 and $15 each time. Those who are unable to pay are sometimes abused, and often prevented from continuing their journey. This reality was confirmed through personal observations conducted in the bus en route from Niamey to Agadez.

These observations help in the formulation of a hypothesis to explain the failure of anti-irregular migration policies sponsored by the EU and implemented by local governments: while de jure irregular migration has been criminalised in Niger, de facto it amounts to a practice that is largely tolerated, normalised and even institutionalised in the framework of a state-sponsored protection racket. From this point of view, the inherent contradictions between the security imperatives of national and international actors have neutralised the impact of the repressive measures that Niamey was urged to adopt to fight irregular migration. The subsequent paragraphs devise a methodology to test this hypothesis. Furthermore, I provide a plausible explanation for the outstanding resilience of state-sponsored protection rackets in Niger. To this end, I analyse the political economy of the borderlands by drawing on the notions of security assemblage, and of security practices. For the former, I am indebted to Sandor (Reference Sandor2016: 494): ‘security assemblages are constitutive of multi-sited institutional orders that link the governance, spaces and practices of both governmental and non-governmental actors across disparate political jurisdictions, balking at neat sovereign delineations’. For the latter, I make reference to Adler-Nissen's (Reference Adler-Nissen2015) theorisation that security practices represent the political dimension of the everyday, which can contribute to ordering or disordering the social assemblage, including through subtle forms of subaltern agency and defiance.

DETECTING STATE-SPONSORED PROTECTION RACKETS

In their seminal study, Richard Snyder and Angelica Duran-Martinez (Reference Snyder and Duran-Martinez2009) introduced the notion of state-sponsored protection rackets, defined as ‘informal institutions through which public officials refrain from enforcing the law or, alternatively, enforce it selectively against the rivals of a criminal organization, in exchange for a share of the profits generated by the organization’ (Snyder and Duran-Martinez Reference Snyder and Duran-Martinez2009: 254). An obvious indicator of a state-sponsored protection racket is the impunity granted to the major actors of the extra-legal economy protected by and connected to the state apparatus. Moreover, the de facto tolerance of formally illegal activities ends up removing one of the most significant obstacles hindering the development of an otherwise profitable economic sector. One would then expect illegal markets to abide by the same dynamics of their legal counterparts: a developing market, promising huge returns of investments, attracts forward-looking entrepreneurs, resulting in the multiplication of suppliers and in a parallel reduction of the costs for consumers. Lastly, in the framework of a state-sponsored protection racket – Snyder and Duran-Martinez argue – the state de facto acts as a regulator and an enforcer, thereby reducing the need and the opportunity for criminal actors to resort to violence and engage in an arms race to protect their businesses. One could therefore expect a greater degree of security and safety for all market operators involved, both providers/suppliers and customers/consumers of regularised illicit goods and services.

To sum up, and translate this abstract template into practical terms, the existence of a human smuggling racket across Niger sponsored by state authorities could be deduced by the following indicators: (1) a drop in the price requested/extorted from prospective migrants in Agadez to cross the Sahara Desert and reach Libya; (2) an increase in the number of independent smugglers in Agadez; (3) widespread impunity of those engaging in the market of human smuggling; and (4) greater safety of smuggling routes, and a parallel greater safety of migrants themselves along their journey from Agadez to Libya. Interestingly enough, most of these indicators run counter to the predictions of some literature about the consequences of a sincere and effective criminalisation of human smuggling. Hence, these indicators represent a somewhat difficult test to deduce the existence of a racket protecting human smuggling sponsored by Nigerien authorities.

Secondly, one should observe that, by definition, state-sponsored protection rackets can hardly stretch beyond a state's reach. As Niamey's authorities have a limited capacity to enforce formal and informal rules even across Niger, their influence is likely to fade significantly across the borders. It is therefore legitimate (and even likely) to expect a different situation in Libya. Nothing in principle prevents a state-sponsored protection racket to take place in Libya as well, of course, and indeed this seemed to be the case under Gadaffi's rule (Toaldo Reference Toaldo2015; Tinti & Westcott Reference Tinti and Westcott2016; El Kamouni-Janssen Reference El Kamouni-Janssen2017). However, the fragmentation of state authority in contemporary Libya seriously weakens the probability of this continuing. Instead, the lack of a unitary actor enforcing the extra-legal social contract has the potential to result in a greater resort to violence to ‘regulate’ the market and protect one's own turf, thus undermining the safety of smuggling routes, as well as that of smugglers and migrants. Recent research on southern Libya (Shaw & Mangan Reference Shaw and Mangan2015; Wehrey Reference Wehrey2017) has indeed further substantiated the expectations of the Snyder and Duran-Martinez model. While such fundamental discontinuities prevent the present article from engaging in an in-depth analysis of the smuggling infrastructure prevailing in Libya, the detection of diverging trends can contribute to corroborating the argument advanced.

Building on the available literature and on insiders’ perspectives, it is possible to reconstruct with a certain degree of accuracy the variations in the price of the ‘ticket’ requested from migrants for the journey across the Sahara Desert. The price of a trip from Agadez to Sebha has reduced considerably. According to UNODC, in 2011 the standard price of transport from Agadez to the Libyan border was 150,000 CFAFootnote ⁹ (around $240), and arguably more to reach Sebha, which is located another 600 km to the north (UNODC 2011). Moreover, in 2011 transports were largely performed by old commercial trucks, much slower and yet featuring a greater carrying capacity than today's 4 × 4 Toyota Hilux (Tinti & Westcott Reference Tinti and Westcott2016). In spite of all this, prices have not increased. In 2013, a ride from Agadez to Libyan southern cities could cost as little as $200 (Tinti & Westcott Reference Tinti and Westcott2016), while in the same year Lewis (Reference Lewis2014) reported even lower figures, i.e. 115,000 CFA (about $190) to travel in a pick-up from Agadez to Al Qatrun, the first main town inside Libya. In 2015, the whole journey to Sebha could be purchased in Agadez for 100,000 CFA, the equivalent of $160 (Sahan/IGAD 2016). Nigerien CSOs confirmed that ‘the average price to go to Libya is 100,000 CFA, and even less’ (TB 2015 Int.). This downward cost trend has continued: ‘From Agadez to Libya, each migrant pays between 80,000 and 90,000 CFA for a trip that lasts three to four days’ (Saley & Fodou Reference Saley and Fodou2016). Human smugglers from Agadez, interviewed for the present research in fact complained that ‘many people now manage to pay less than 100,000 from Agadez to Sebha. Prices keep on going down. The problem is that everyone is coming to Agadez; there are too many of us, and too much competition’ (BT 2016 Int.).Footnote ¹⁰

The latter observation hints at the second indicator mentioned above. The fall in price of the trip from Niger to Libya is strictly correlated to the sharp increase in the number of smugglers supplying options to cross the border. Local sources confirm that, with the booming numbers of migrants from West Africa attempting to go to Libya, people from the whole region were attracted by the job opportunities offered in the informal industry of human smuggling in Agadez (YC 2016 Int.). A wealth of small-scale services aimed at migrants-in-transit has proliferated in the last few years, including restaurants, money transfers, cheap accommodation, sales of water cans, etc. (Saley & Fodou Reference Saley and Fodou2016). The number of ‘travel agencies’ offering trips to Sebha has skyrocketed, from 15 in 2007 to 70 in 2013, and likely even more afterwards (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). The same trend has been observed in the number of so-called ‘ghettoes’ providing accommodation to migrants while waiting for departure, often in connection with smugglers and passeurs; while the exact figure remains opaque, they are estimated to exceed 100 (Siegfried Reference Siegfried2017). As a result, ‘the population of Agadez [has] boomed, because everyone wants to join the El Dorado of the migration industry’ (NN 2015 Int.). According to the region's representatives, by mid-2017 6,700 individuals in Agadez lived off the profits of human smuggling, leading to the overpopulation of the town (AM 2017 Int.). A significant indicator of this trend is that ‘the price of real estate in town has exploded’ (YC 2016 Int.).

The overt proliferation of service providers in a formally illegal economic field speaks volumes of the degree of impunity of human smuggling in Agadez. According to Nigerien NGOs ‘what happens on the ground is an open secret [un secret de Policinelle]. Everyone is aware of it, including ministries’ (TB 2016 Int.). The smuggling industry in Agadez has been so blatant and normalized that smugglers can set up and run undisturbed a Bureau des Trafiquants, a Traffickers’ Union, to foster coordination and protect their collective interests. Interviewed for the present research, a representative of the Union claimed: ‘we have no problem with the police, we actually hardly see them. They do not bother us, because the whole city lives out of smuggling. It is evident that there are no other job opportunities in Agadez. Sometimes we undergo a few formalities, we register the passengers’ names, we pay a local “tax”, and they let us go’ (BT 2016 int.). Tinti & Westcott's (Reference Tinti and Westcott2016: 9) findings further corroborate this view: ‘smugglers in Agadez say that the only people who can expect to be punished are those who are not paying the requisite bribes’. Such an ambiguous attitude has prompted local observers to argue that the authorities’ actions in erratically imposing the law are merely ‘symbolic’ (Tinti & Westcott Reference Tinti and Westcott2016: 9), and that ‘Niger's willingness to cooperate with the EU is a bluff. On the ground, the actors behave quite differently and empty existing laws of any meaning’ (HM 2016 Int.). The adoption of law 36/2015 criminalising human smuggling did little to change things, and one year later EU officers were forced to recognise, in private, that ‘this is the most unpopular law of the country, and it has never been applied so far’ (NN 2016 Int.).

Aware of the failure of its own strategy, in the summer of 2016 the EU began to adopt a more aggressive stance. Niamey was forced into compliance by linking the disbursement of about €1 billion of development aidFootnote ¹¹ to the respect of stringent conditionalities in the fight against irregular migration. Such a carrot-and-stick approach initially seemed to yield the expected results: police forces started rounding up human smugglers and ghetto leaders, resulting in the unprecedented arrest of 47 individuals and the impounding of 67 vehicles (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). This led some EU officers to observe, with undisguised satisfaction: ‘the south of Libya represents an absolute priority for the EU, but we approach it from the south, i.e. through Niger, because there we have a greater leverage. We have developed an excellent relationship with Niamey’ (KL 2017 int.). However, it soon turned out that this enthusiasm was perhaps partly misguided. People arrested in Agadez were often convicted without due process, and on grounds that had to do less with law enforcement than with ethnic discrimination, and the perpetuation of a state-sponsored protection racket. It should be stressed, in fact, that while the administration of Agadez is led by Tuareg elites with close connections to Niamey, all the vehicles seized belonged to Tebu smugglers (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). Tebus are a historically marginalised minority of Niger – representing 0·4% of the overall population – who have managed nevertheless to acquire a prominent position in the smuggling of migrants from Agadez to Sebha, due to their control of the Tummo border checkpoint, at the frontier with Libya (Tinti & Westcott Reference Tinti and Westcott2016; El Kamouni-Janssen Reference El Kamouni-Janssen2017). Furthermore, the wave of arrests deliberately spared all the kingpins of major Nigerien bus companies, despite persistent rumours about their involvement in cross-border human smuggling (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). According to Agadez local authorities:

This situation led one civil society organisation to conclude that recent measures are all for show and do not contradict the rule of impunity: ‘the government sometimes pretends to care about the international community, but it is really not its main concern. Pretending to care allows the government to continue receiving money from the EU’ (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017: 13).

In spite of – or perhaps precisely due to – widespread impunity, migrants consider Niger as a relatively safe country.Footnote ¹² According to local actors ‘Today, the route from Agadez is much safer than the route through Gao and north Mali’ (MD 2016 Int.).

While migrants have also reported cases of abuses in Niger, including beatings and other violence, their severity and prevalence is incomparably higher in the subsequent legs of the migratory routes leading to Europe, and most notably in Libya. Here, systematic patterns of kidnapping-for-ransom, sexual exploitation, enslavement and torture take place (Reitano & Tinti Reference Reitano and Tinti2015; Sahan/IGAD 2016; El Kamouni-Janssen Reference El Kamouni-Janssen2017). The most comprehensive statistics available confirm that, while 72% of migrants having reached Sicily self-report to have suffered abuse along their journey, almost all of this abuse took place in Libya, and not in Niger (International Organization of Migration 2016a ). Niger has been contrasting starkly with Libya in terms of safety and the security of the smuggling routes, both for smugglers and migrants. Building on Snyder & Duran-Martinez (Reference Snyder and Duran-Martinez2009), this supports the argument that human smuggling in Niger is performed in the framework of a state-sponsored protection racket. Further corroborating this argument, it is noteworthy that when the security equilibrium in Libya changed and (symbolic) repression peaked in Agadez as well, as a result of EU pressures, the number of casualties among migrants started to soar in Niger, too (The New York Times 2017).

THE RESILIENCE OF STATE-SPONSORED PROTECTION RACKETS, AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF HUMAN SMUGGLING IN NIGER

The above analysis contributes to substantiating the contention that in Niger, human smuggling feeds a racket protected and enforced by state authorities. It remains to be seen why such a protection racket proves so resilient, in spite of the numerous material and symbolic incentives offered to Niamey's central authorities by their international partners to curb irregular migration. To this end, this section delves into the infrastructure of human smuggling in Niger, by focusing on the linkages of the latter to local networks of patronage politics and ‘big men’ (Utas Reference Utas2012).

As noted above, human smuggling enjoys a significant degree of social legitimacy in north Niger, even if the formal legal framework in place criminalises it. This has not only to do with the well-known observation that in Niger, just like elsewhere in West Africa, ‘a business involving a willing seller and a willing buyer’ can be seen as completely legitimate, while the legal texts codifying that transaction almost represent a mere abstraction of little importance (Ellis Reference Ellis2009: 178). One should also add that, in a region characterised by a very poor endowment of natural resources, one periodically hit by major environmental disruptions, and lagging at the very bottom of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index, the resort to cross-border smuggling of goods and labour has long represented a major strategy of resilience for local communities (Reference KohlKohl Reference Kohl2013). Through trade and transhumance, nomadic tribes living in the area, such as the Tebus and the Tuaregs, have made of mobility a forme de vie, as ethnographic investigations have demonstrated (Claudot-Hawad Reference Claudot-Hawad2008; Scheele Reference Scheele2012). While smuggling and trafficking are deeply rooted in the local political economy, practices of human mobility pre-date by far the legal framework criminalising them, as well as the institutionalisation of independent modern states.

According to a security perception survey carried out in the borderlands straddling Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, cross-border traffic of all sorts is seen as among the top 10 security threats by less than 2% of the respondents (Danish Demining Group 2014). On the contrary, the opening of the borders to trade in goods is the priority for the communities, in order to deal with what is perceived as truly threatening: that is, quite unsurprisingly, poverty. Building on a number of focus groups with local communities, Reitano & Shaw (Reference Reitano and Shaw2014: 4) observed that ‘the capacity to smuggle contraband, derive profit from trafficking, and migrate across the porous borders of the region is the resilience strategy that most communities employ to survive’. In other words, both migration and human smuggling are first and foremost seen as strategies of resilience, irrespective of their legal status.

Local and state authorities, formally entrusted with law enforcement duties, often prefer to adapt to, rather than challenge, these widespread practices. Lewis (Reference Lewis2014) reported the view of the then-president of Niger's national commission tasked with fighting against people trafficking, according to whom ‘the level of tolerance of this issue in society is very high. This has led to a high level of impunity. People think that it is just a normal job’. Similarly, the International Organization of Migration (2014: 112) acknowledged that

A Nigerien gendarme deployed in the northern region of Tahoua, interviewed for the present research, confirmed that he did not consider migration to be a problem (SG 2016 Int.). The de facto institutionalisation of smuggling and trafficking transcends individual preferences, and amounts instead to a tacit rule rooted in everyday practices, or a ‘practical norm’ that everyone has to comply with – to borrow Olivier de Sardan's (Reference Olivier de Sardan2015) expression. Tidjani Alou confirms that whereas fraud networks thrive ‘in informal free-trade zones tolerated by the state … smuggling has developed into a culture’ (Tidjani Alou Reference Tidjani Alou, Bach and Gazibo2012: 146). Focus groups conducted with borderland inhabitants in Niger and Mali also confirmed this view quite systematically.Footnote ¹³ The discrepancy between (inter)national norm(ality) and local legitimacy could not be greater.

It needs to be stressed that the survival of smuggling practices is not only the consequence of normative concerns. While social legitimacy and economic significance contribute to shielding human smuggling from international pressures, the need to preserve a fragile political equilibrium in the turbulent north also plays a prominent role. In 2007–2009, Niger went through a period of civil war, when the Tuareg community, representing the majority of the population in the north of the country, revolted against its perceived marginalisation in Niamey. At the end of the hostilities, many former rebel leaders were appointed to administrative and political offices, both in Niamey and in the region of Agadez (Grégoire Reference Grégoire2013; Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). A case in point of this process is that of Agali Alambo, one of the leaders of a previous Tuareg revolt in the 1990s. By the end of the insurgency, Alambo was appointed sous-préfet of the northern locality of Arlit, a hub of trans-Saharan trafficking and human smuggling. Alambo also headed the revolt of 2007, as the leader of the Mouvement Nigérien pour la Justice (MNJ); at the end of the hostilities, Alambo escaped to Libya, where he became an advisor to Gaddafi. When the Libyan regime was toppled, Alambo came back to Niger, at the head of an armed convoy. Arrested by the Nigerien army, he was prosecuted and convicted for terrorism. Yet soon thereafter, the Nigerien president pardoned Alambo and appointed him secretary to the presidency of parliament, a clear move of appeasement (Raineri Reference Raineri2015).

In the meantime, rank-and-file soldiers of the Tuareg insurgencies had engaged in the process of DDR (demobilisation, disarmament, reintegration) and been reintegrated into civilian life by taking up jobs as tourist guides and drivers (Kohl Reference Kohl2013). Tourism seemed to be one of the few promising markets in the region of Agadez at the time. The outbreak of large-scale civil wars in neighbouring Mali and Libya in 2011 however, halted this. When the volumes of migratory flows through Agadez started to soar in 2013, the high demand for skilled local drivers in the smuggling industry helped reabsorb a youth only trained at driving or fighting. ‘All the travel agencies that were once in the rebellion have now converted into the transport of migrants. They claim this is their way of life [forme de vie] and that no one will stop them!’ (TB 2015 Int.)

The officer in charge of migration policies in the Regional Council of Agadez recognised the fundamental continuity between the travel agencies devoted to tourism and those involved in human smuggling and implicitly pointed at the protection offered to these actors by their patrons, formerly in the rebellion, and currently in the governmental bureaucracy: ‘Migration in the region of Agadez generates resources, because it has replaced a nurturing activity, that of tourism. Migrants are today's tourists. They are welcomed, accommodated and transported wherever they need to go, and everyone is involved’ (Saley & Fodou Reference Saley and Fodou2016). One could claim then, that the patronage networks protecting human smuggling stretch from remote villages in the north of Niger to the sancta sanctorum of political power in the capital city, and ensure a modicum of stability in otherwise conflict-prone areas. From this perspective, and in spite of existing laws and international pressures, it is hardly surprising that local and national authorities are not so keen on criminalising human smuggling with the concomitant risk of compromising a fragile, albeit vital, political equilibrium. Although international aid may help to provide alternative job opportunities in the short run, unfulfilled promises have the potential to trigger popular discontent with serious destabilising effects (AM 2017 Int.).

Beyond former Tuareg combatants, the owners of major bus companies feature prominently among those who have benefitted from the protection of Niamey's authorities, despite their well-known involvement in all sorts of trafficking, including human smuggling. Two firms, 3STV and RIMBO, are now major bus companies belonging to Nigerien businessmen, Chérife Abidine and Rhissa Mohamed respectively. Both companies have grown suspiciously from a start in the early 2000s to now being among the most prominent and most profitable transporters in the whole of West Africa. Persistent rumours suggest that vehicles belonging to these companies, while ostensibly for public transport usage, have been instrumental in the development of a regional network of smuggled goods, such as cigarettes, counterfeited medicines, cocaine, synthetic drugs and sometimes even weapons, to the extent that, for instance, Chérife Abidine was locally nicknamed ‘Chérife Cocaine’, or ‘the Boss’ of Agadez (Raineri Reference Raineri2015). Connecting most of the regional capitals to Niamey and Agadez, these bus companies have greatly contributed to the development of human smuggling across West Africa, by turning a blind-eye to the transport of undocumented migrants and by fostering the bribery of custom officers (Malakooti et al. Reference Malakooti, Benattia and Armitano2015; Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017).

Local observers point out that ‘with the quotation of uranium declining worldwide, transporters and smugglers have become the most prominent economic actors in the country, and they now exert a considerable political leverage’ (IB 2015 Int.). The rise to power of the current president of Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, owes much to the alliances he managed to forge with ethnic Tuareg transporters and smugglers, who were until then lacking a political patron. Chérif Abidine occupied the presidency of Issoufou's party branch in Agadez, and headed the Agadez list for the 2016 National Assembly elections until his death in February 2016. Rhissa Mohamed is currently seen as one of the major sponsors of Issoufou's PNDS (Parti Nigérien pour la Démocratie et le Socialisme), and supported generously the latter's presidential campaigns in 2011 and 2016. However, according to the local chapter of Transparency International, ‘in 2012 the Court of Auditors had reported numerous false statements about the source of funding declared by the candidates for the elections of 2011. In particular, the candidates of the PNDS were heavily involved’ (WA 2015 Int.). The preservation of Issoufou's presidency, then, is intertwined with the protection of the economic interests of the Tuareg elites owning the major bus companies in the country. The abrupt discontinuation of human trafficking would have the potential to undermine this alliance, and could force the strong lobby of Nigerien transporters to look for another patron. The smuggling industry, in other words, is not only a component of the political economy of north Niger, but is also part of the gears and wheels of the political assemblage at a national level.

As a last point, one should observe that the implementation of a harsher policy vis-à-vis human smuggling in Niger, if it ever were undertaken, would obviously depend on the cooperation of the local security forces, including the police and the military. However, this cannot be taken for granted, as Niger's security apparatus is far from incorporating the ethos of a Weberian institution. In little more than half a century, the history of independent Niger is littered with a number of military coups overthrowing the incumbent regimes (1974, 1996, 1999, 2010). The intrinsic volatility of the institutional setup is particularly significant in the present context: ‘historically, the PNDS has been the opposition in Niger. Issoufou has remained an “unidentified object” for the military, who did not know him well, and his position is fragile until he obtains their trust’ (NN 2016 Int.). With a view to sorting out his relationship with the military to mutually beneficial arrangements, Issoufou promoted (by convincing Niger's international partners to fund) a substantial increase in the budget of the security sector. According to local NGOs, the security budget was multiplied by a factor of 10 (AH 2015 Int.), and it is now said to exceed 10% of the national GDP (International Crisis Group 2017). However, numerous sources concur that the newly injected resources hardly hit the ground, nor did they contribute significantly to alleviate the dissatisfaction of the ordinary rank and file soldiers (MS 2015 Int.). ‘The anticorruption body HALCIA found the military budget earmarked to buy fuel, spare parts and foods to disappear in the capital’ (Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017: 31), to the benefit of high-ranking military officers’ illicit trades (International Crisis Group 2017).

It is very likely that political authorities in Niamey do not ignore – no one does – that national security forces enforce a systematic racket on migrants, which includes extortions, misappropriation and solicitation of bribes, as virtually all the available reports have highlighted (Lewis Reference Lewis2014; Malakooti et al. Reference Malakooti, Benattia and Armitano2015; Reitano & Tinti Reference Reitano and Tinti2015; Sahan/IGAD 2016; Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017). One could argue that the government tolerates this misconduct as a form of compensation to keep the security apparatuses quiet. The acquiescence of the security forces is in fact crucial at a time when the army is deployed against terrorists on several fronts, and submits to considerable sacrifices in very poor conditions. In fact, according to Tinti & Westcott (Reference Tinti and Westcott2016: 16) ‘Niger's state anti-corruption agency found that state security forces would not be able to function were it not for these bribes paid by smugglers and migrants’. By draining an important source of income, a more rigorous fight against human smuggling across Niger would risk provoking resistance and dissatisfaction at best, and open revolt, at worst, among the military and the police, with a tremendous destabilising potential. In this context, turning a blind-eye to the harassment of migrants by the security forces is seen by Nigerien authorities as a lesser evil and indeed, a necessity. As the representative of a Nigerien human rights organisation commented: ‘the protests against the police and military abuses on migrants are in vain. Today the uniformed men have all the power, and no one dares to challenge them. Even ministers are afraid’ (AH 2015 Int.).

To sum up, then, several characteristics of the human smuggling infrastructure in Niger come together to explain the resilience of a state-sponsored protection racket: the social legitimacy of smuggling and of migration; the dependence of political leaders on economic networks deeply involved in the smuggling enterprise; and the weakness of democratically elected officers, including at the highest levels, vis-à-vis the effective blackmail of powerful security actors with vested interests in the perpetuation of smuggling.

CONCLUSION: CONTRADICTORY SECURITY IMPERATIVES IN THE SAHEL

Despite the increasing efforts of the EU to encourage Nigerien authorities to crack down on irregular migration, the outcomes of the securitisation and criminalisation of migration across Niger differ from previous observations and from EU expectations. In Niger, in fact, human smuggling is part of a state-sponsored protection racket, which has proved extremely resilient. This can be attributed to a number of reasons: on the one hand, human mobility enjoys a high degree of social legitimacy in northern Niger, because of its cultural and economic value, irrespective of the legal status of migrants. On the other hand, the smuggling industry intermingles with local networks of patronage politics that contribute to Niger's precarious stability.

While the former aspect might be less of a priority for the European Union's security, the latter exposes the contradictions of the EU security strategy in the extended neighbourhood. Since the adoption of the seminal European Security Strategy (Council of the European Union 2003), the EU has been securitising migratory flows towards Europe. These were increasingly seen as endowed with the potential to feed the transnational ‘enemies’ of the EU, most notably criminal cartels and terrorist organisations. To prevent the proliferation of these threats, the EU has increasingly favoured the strategic option to promote the consolidation of third countries seen as fragile, by supporting their sovereign prerogatives, such as the security apparatuses and the institutions ensuring a modicum of good governance. However, the case of Niger exposes the contradictions in this approach, in as much as the stability of the country and the perpetuation of irregular migratory flows are not antinomic, but strongly intertwined.

Facing such a contradiction, the EU runs the risk of an embarrassing stalemate, which underscores an increasing disconnect between rhetoric, intentions and capabilities. As compared with its neighbours, Niger remains an island of relative stability surrounded by hotbeds of tensions, civil wars and terrorism. Since its installation in 2011, Issoufou's regime has proven a formidable and trustworthy ally of the EU in the fight against Islamist terrorism in Africa, including Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Boko Haram, to the extent that Niger is now the pivot of an increasing number of NATO countries’ military engagement in the region (International Crisis Group 2017). On the other hand, the opposition coalescing against Issoufou's power system, albeit fragmented and disparate, has showed some porosity with radical Islamist factions. This was most notably manifested by the riots accompanying Issoufou's participation in the solidarity rally organised in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, in January 2015, when protesters took to the streets and devastated the few Christian churches of Niamey and Zinder. Irrespective of how serious EU concern is vis-à-vis irregular migration, Brussels cannot run the risk of weakening Niamey's precarious stability by putting too much pressure on the criminalisation of human smuggling.

Paralysed by the contradiction between two diverging security imperatives, i.e. the fight against irregular migration and the preservation of Niger's stability, the EU has ended up condoning highly questionable practices by Niamey's authorities. These include the clientelistic use of development aid and military support formally destined to enhance the country's good governance and security (International Crisis Group 2017; Molenaar Reference Molenaar2017); the systematic racket around migrants and the complete impunity of the security forces; a soaring trafficking of all sorts of drugs across the country (in Niger the EU dedicates incomparably less effort to the disruption of drug smuggling than of human smuggling); and the turning of repressive laws and institutions, originally aimed at clamping down on terrorism, against political opposition and civil society. Indeed, according to civil society organisations in Niamey: ‘the top priority of the government is security at all costs, and certainly not the rule of law; … the anti-terrorism law of 2011 is very broad and vague, leaving much room for abuses, and it is often used against opposition parties which are prosecuted for terrorism with no ground’ (AH 2015 Int.). In this framework, even when Niamey strives to honour its international commitments, it does so in a biased and distorted way, as the selective tightening on the passeurs in Agadez testifies.

As a result, popular dissatisfaction in Niger is rising. The grievances against the regime (a regime that the EU is somewhat obliged to maintain in spite of itself), risks pushing large sectors of the marginalised youth towards a process of political and religious radicalisation. ‘With local governments seen as corrupt, radical Islamism offers a moral discourse and a corpus of rules and values very attractive for the youth’ (Arnaud Reference Arnaud2016: 61). A local activist confirms that ‘today in Niger the poor are getting poorer, and the rich richer, because of the trafficking. The state and the army are deeply involved, but they are untouchable. Facing with this situation, the people, and the youth in particular, lose their faith in democracy, isolate themselves, or climb the ladder of radicalisation’ (IC 2016 Int.). An EU officer conceded that ‘in the long run, the in-depth Islamisation of society is likely to represent a far more compelling security challenge for Europe than migration is now’ (SB 2016 Int.).

In conclusion, while the Nigerien youth finds itself between the rock of radicalisation and the hard place of irregular migration to Europe, one is led to conclude – somewhat paradoxically – that human mobility is more an opportunity than a threat to promote the security of Europe, and the stability of Niger. As a result, the present analysis cannot but concur with previous studies which emphasised that interventions designed to reduce irregular migration must be predicated on a far more nuanced understanding of local dynamics and the non-state actors facilitating the trade. This stresses the need for further research on a subject that does not look like it is going away any time soon.