Security at the Borders: Transnational Practices and Technologies in West Africa by Philippe M. Frowd (review)

There is much more to international borders than the casual observer may realize, and Philippe M. Frowd's timely contribution makes no effort to shy away from their complexity. Borders, we are told, are not merely lines in the sand. Instead, they are 'heterogenous order-making devices', as well as vibrant social institutions, sites of governance, and technical spaces in which acts of inclusion and exclusion are decided, implemented and experienced. Aided by technological advances in biometrics and international criminal databases, borders can be felt throughout a state's territory, not just at the geographical edges. What makes them real are the repeated performances – the borderwork – of actors and nonhuman materials that reinforce or subvert state control.

Frowd explores this complex arena in Senegal and Mauritania, two states with a long history of interventions that combat mass migration, terrorism and drug trafficking. EU security professionals and their West African counterparts will no doubt take a keen interest in the book, not least because they feature prominently in its pages. Frowd's effective adaptation of Chris Rumsford's('Introduction: citizens and borderwork in Europe', Space and Polity, 2008) concept of borderwork, which he uses to map assemblages of actors, is made all the more impressive by how difficult gaining access to these individuals must have been. Philip Abrams ('Notes on the difficulty of studying the state', 1977) observes how attempts to examine politically institutionalized power at close quarters almost always highlight how much that power depends on withholding information, denying observation, and dictating the terms of knowledge. Yet close quarters are exactly what Frowd offers us, in off-duty encounters with gendarmes, in the break rooms of counterterrorism workshops, and in the secure backrooms of West African airports. The author analyses these encounters warts and all, highlighting divergent views, competing funding mandates and corrupt informal practices wherever they are observed.

The book is divided into two approximately even halves, with Part I emphasizing theory and Part II dedicated to insights from the author's fieldwork. Several of the cases could be framed as intervention success stories – Mauritania's imposition of state control over its distant border posts, for example, or Senegal's dramatic reduction of irregular migration to the Canary Islands. Nevertheless, readers in search of specific policy prescriptions will find themselves dismayed by the first half of the text. Chapters 2 and 3 plunge undaunted into a theoretical quagmire of actor network theory, critical security studies, international political sociology, Bourdieusian fields, pockets of effectiveness, mutable and mobile border knowledges, actants, rhizomes and assemblages. It does not always make for comfortable reading and serves as a reminder of how intricate the field of border security has become, and how vapid the easy answers deployed in popular political discourse tend to be. Frowd skilfully weaves disparate theoretical concepts together into a framework that advances four central themes of border-work: being abstracted from territory; networked and cultural; constructed and performed; and creative of order. The book stands out in the way in which it integrates materiality into the analysis, treating such things as patrol boats, biometric ID cards, training manuals, police decorations and certificates mounted on office walls as objects with agency that shape the border itself.

Chapters 4–6 apply this theoretical framework to three empirical cases. The first examines the everyday interactions between Spanish and West African police forces attempting to curtail irregular migration to the Canary Islands. The externalization of EU borders onto African territory is nothing new, but Frowd finds compelling material: in the competing cultures of border security between the actors involved; the limits of European knowledge and technology; and the mission creep that has led targeted efforts to control irregular migration to develop into much broader 'border control' initiatives. Chapter 5 finds a similar arrangement in an EU/IOM (International Organization for Migration) project to construct border posts in Mauritania, where the control of migration has...