Political Repression, Refugee Crises and Labor Migration from Post-Colonial Mali

This article zooms in on the ways in which forced migration articulates with labor migration in urban West Africa. Precisely, it reflects on how the refugee crisis contributes to labor migration and, inversely, how labor migration is used as a strategy to respond to the predicament induced by the adverse and often deeply humiliating living conditions of exile. To this end, we situate the article within broader scholarly debates on migration categories. We use the notion “exile” to refer to the social conditions induced by political persecution-related relocations from Mali to Niger and Senegal. Our discussion draws on data collected from freeborn Tuareg from Mali in Niamey and former Malian students who fled the dictatorship of Moussa Traoré. The results prompt a reflection that prioritizes the empirical connections between forced and labor migrations over their differences, something that is often taken for granted in the academic literature and in political narratives.