Diplomatic pressures on countries in West Africa to cooperate on migration-related issues has been high, and growing, in recent years. Numerous policy initiatives underscore this, going back to the 1992 Declaration on Principles Governing External Aspects of Migration Policy, which included the idea of EU return agreements with countries of origin and transit. Most recently, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in 2024, underscores the importance of return as one of the cornerstones of their revised common approach, with a new returns directive proposed by the European Commission in March 2025. Over time, negative incentives linked to cooperation on migration issues have become increasingly prevalent. A revised visa code from 2020, allows the EU to use Visa access as leverage with third countries, including restrictive measures related to processing and fees if a country is not cooperating. Yet, the numbers of actual return to key countries with the highest number of migrants with an order to leave is still surprisingly low: between 2015 and 2019, the cumulative return rations of Senegal, Nigeria and The Gambia fluctuated between 14 % (in 2016) to 23% (in 2015). In 2019, the ratio was at 17% meaning that the EU was only able to return 17% of those with an order to leave to their respective countries.
In recent years, there has been a flurry of new research considering Global South perspectives in migration cooperation, including different formal and informal diplomatic tools available to them. In this blog, based on a previously published article, I focus on how agency of African states can work in the face of extreme pressure from the EU to cooperate on returns. The dilemma for states goes a little like this: there are huge incentives to comply with EU pressure (read development aid) and negative consequences if you don’t – general diplomatic fallout, to visa sanctions. And yet, states know that enforced returns will lead to a reduction in remittances, may push already frustrated people on to labour market that offer insufficient jobs, and can lead to conflict and tensions in families, communities and beyond. More than anything, deportations are undignified. In other words, allowing your own citizens to be deported means acquiescing to enacting violence upon them. In one interview conducted for this research, a civil society activist in Senegal noted, “They say that the state of Senegal has gone to repatriate, which is why Germany is giving funds. This is not normal, because human dignity should not be exchanged for money, and this is not normal at all” (Interview, Dakar, July 2019).
This blog post is based on over 100 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, politicians, civil society activists, and academic experts conducted (in collaboration with several colleagues) in Niger, Nigeria, The Gambia and Senegal. Focusing on the latter three countries as example, I argue that states develop subtle often very implicit ways of responding to EU pressures on return cooperation. Outright resistance is diplomatically difficult, but overlooking some of the quieter responses would undermine the agency of African states in a non-level playing field.
My research found that the way that states respond ranges from compliance to incompliance, both reactive and proactive. These are often used in combination with each other and can change over time. Here, I divide into three categories: reluctant compliance on return, reactive incompliance on return, and proactive incompliance on return.
Reluctant compliance on return
Development aid for migration-related purposes makes it potentially lucrative for governments to cooperate with the EU. Because of this, one possible response for governments in West Africa is to comply with return cooperation. Negative incentives imposed on governments, for instance through visa sanctions, are another reason to reluctantly comply on return cooperation. One interviewee in The Gambia, working for an international organization, explained “the economic might that they [the EU] bring into the discussion, [hence]…governments accept to sign these [return] contracts because these contracts are conditioned to other financial supports from the EU to the country” (Interview, Serrekunda, May 2019).
Yet, state actors do not just comply with cooperation pressures. Government officials may make an effort to distance themselves from cooperation efforts. At the very least, development projects with a strong tie to external migration interests can raise “unsaid insidious questions”, according to one of our Senegal-based interlocutors (Interview implementing partner, Dakar, 29 July 2019). As a result, those EU-funded projects implemented in Senegal, are ones that are based on previous Senegalese reiterations of projects that already existed. The idea being – whether factually true or not – that the government is not submitting to the pressure to the extent of implementing things that are not already part of their political vision of the country.
Another frequent way to side-step form and clear compliance is by attempting to cooperate under the radar. There has been a steady growth of informal agreements. In fact, in terms of formal agreements, there is only on Mobility Partnership with a Sub-Saharan African country, Cape Verde in 2007, and two less binding Common Agendas for Migration and Mobility, signed with Nigeria and Ethiopia in 2015. For the EU, informal agreements may be more realistic to achieve, and for their partner countries in West Africa, informality avoids public scrutiny and is therefore potentially less costly in terms of domestic legitimacy. One of our interviewees, a policy consultant in Abuja also noted that such informal agreements, including Memoranda of Understanding were useful for ‘testing the waters’ before signing a permanent agreement (Interview, March 2019). In The Gambia, a newly elected government tentatively began to improve cooperation with the EU on return matters after signing an informal agreement (a ‘good practice agreement’) in 2018. This ultimately backfired. The lack of transparency and miscommunication on the deal led to rumors of government officials “selling the backway people” (Interview, Gambian activist, Freiburg, May 2017, backway being the name of migrants taking irregular routes to Europe).
Reactive incompliance on return
There are several strategies used to avoid compliance with forced returns in a more reactive manner. This includes failing to adhere to technical steps or pointing to technical issues for justifying incompliance. One direct reactive form of incompliance is the non-engagement in identification missions. Migrants need to be identified by states as their own nationals and receive some form of identification papers in order to physically be able to fly home. Without IDs – both passports and laissez-passer documentation, deportations cannot be processed. State delegations are regularly invited to come and identify a number of migrants with no leave to remain as their own nationals. One form of incompliance we saw in the course of our research, was national missions that were delayed, never took place or didn’t identify supposed nationals for any other reasons. Such a reaction, is not saying we will not comply, but it is also not expending excessive energy in compliance either.
Beyond this, any number of technical reasons can justify non-compliance. Again, this is not an outright refusal to engage with deportation, but rather a temporary stay linked to procedural rules like the number of migrants that can be deported in a certain time span, how long in advance a deportation flight needs to be announced for etc. Reactive incompliance allows states to disavow their commitments through inaction, slowing down return operations without vocally speaking out against them. This is less costly in their diplomatic relations than outright disapproval but can also increase domestic legitimacy.
Proactive incompliance on return
Taking into consideration both the domestic and external pressures, some governments are deciding to resist return cooperation more overtly. This can be rather indirectly, like the long-standing active refusal to sign an EU agreement on returns from both Senegal and Nigeria. It can also take on very direct forms in some cases – like the moratorium on deportations in The Gambia.
Indirectly then, negotiations for a formal cooperation agreement on return can drag out, in various forms of ‘passive stalling’ as previous research has shown for EU-Senegal negotiations, under a French lead. Negotiations on a readmission agreement between Nigeria and the EU have infamously dragged on, despite the country signing a CAMM with the EU in 2015. A senior AU official stated:
‘Nigeria is tough to deal with. The EU can arm twist countries like Senegal, Mali; they can’t do that to Nigeria; with the Nigerian government no one really knows what is happening’ (Interview, Berlin, March 2019).
Similarly, a Nigerian academic stated in their interview: ‘I don’t think Nigeria is interested in the migration partnership with EU, at least not in the aspects that the EU is interested in’ (Interview, Nigerian academic, phone, February 2019). As such, the Nigerian government may be using the stalling tactic in order to get benefits (like improved legal migration pathways etc.). They are stalling on the negotiations, and remain proactively incompliant on large-scale return, though never openly and vocally dismissing return or an agreement at all either.
Perhaps given their geopolitical size and position on the continent, a certain diplomatic lenience is to be expected from Nigeria. But (country) size does not seem to matter. The most direct example of proactive incompliance comes from the moratorium on deportations from the tiny and diplomatically rather marginal country, The Gambia. The Gambian authorities claimed that the conditions of the 2018 agreement informal were not maintained, with one flight in February 2019 particularly contested. Issues included the number of police officers on the plane (60), the treatment of the deportees (handcuffed) and that the Gambian authorities had allegedly not been adequately informed of the incoming flight. A tense atmosphere, including a violent incident directly at the airport and protests in response, led to the government imposing a moratorium, stopping all deportation flights to the country. Only after months of anxious negotiations was the moratorium formally lifted in October 2019, though it took years for deportations to significantly increase again. The moratorium and the continuous delay of accepting higher return numbers amounts to proactive incompliance.
Internationally such a strategy can backfire: Visa sanctions for The Gambia were mentioned in passing back in 2019 by a European diplomat (‘that might be an option’, Interview, Serrekunda, May 2019), and in 2021 were adopted for The Gambia, with the press release stating, this ‘decision was taken due to the country’s lack of cooperation on readmission of third-country nationals illegally staying in the EU’ (European Council 2021). They were only lifted in 2024, after the number of returns were at an adequate number again. Adequate for the European partners.
Given the asymmetric power imbalances, an outright form of resistance is unlikely. States have to remain watchful of their political abilities in such a constrained environment. Given the asymmetric power relations of countries in the Global South, it is highly pertinent to give a more nuanced account of interactions between states in this situation and those in a more powerful position.
