This article examines UK “borderwork creep” into ever more sites in states across Africa and considers how it is transformed and produced by practitioners on the ground. The aim is to go beyond research focusing on the EU and Northern and Western Africa to show the more expansive and, in some cases, unexpected reach of UK borderwork. Drawing on interviews, documentary research, and freedom of information requests, I find UK-funded “training” and “capacity building” in 17 African states. This creep, in many cases, is driven less by the UK perceptions of “immigration risk” and more by opportunism based on African counterparts’ interests and the ability of UK immigration liaison officers to establish relationships on the ground. This complicates conventional narratives, and government claims, where externalization is largely seen as a response to perceived “migration crises” and increases in “unwanted” and illegalized mobility. The paper adds to the rich and growing body of research on externalization in Africa by attuning specifically to the productive role of relationships and cumulative dimensions, which have received limited attention to-date. It does so by proposing the metaphor of rippling to better highlight how previous actions and interactions build on each other and spread outward, generating new actions. The result is UK borderwork diffused and distanced from the original goals of externalized migration control.

中文翻译：

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超越“移民风险”的外部化？英国边境工作在非洲的蔓延及其累积的连锁反应


本文探讨了英国“边境工作蔓延”到非洲各国越来越多的地点，并考虑了实地从业者如何对其进行改造和生产。其目的是超越针对欧盟以及北非和西非的研究，展示英国边境工作更广泛的、在某些情况下意想不到的影响范围。根据采访、文献研究和信息自由要求，我发现英国在 17 个非洲国家资助了“培训”和“能力建设”。在许多情况下，这种蔓延的推动因素较少是英国对“移民风险”的看法，更多的是基于非洲同行利益和英国移民联络官建立实地关系能力的机会主义。这使传统的叙述和政府的主张变得复杂，外部化在很大程度上被视为对感知到的“移民危机”以及“不受欢迎”和非法流动的增加的反应。该论文通过专门研究关系和累积维度的生产性作用，为非洲外部化的丰富且不断增长的研究提供了补充，而迄今为止这些研究受到的关注有限。为此，它提出了“涟漪”的比喻，以更好地强调先前的行动和互动如何相互构建并向外传播，从而产生新的行动。结果是英国边境工作分散并偏离了外部化移民控制的最初目标。