“Protecting” Rights of Smuggled Migrants in the Context of State-Enforced Immobility: Legal Borderwork in Senegal

Abstract Human rights rationales have in recent years been increasingly mobilized in international efforts to bring national legal frameworks on migrant smuggling in line with international law. This article explores the role of human rights in borderwork during the externally funded legal reform process of Senegal's legal framework on migrant smuggling. Adopting a multiscalar governmentality lens, it sheds light on human rights governance rationales and their underlying justice logics in the reform process. The article extends work on the human rights/containment/protection nexus and points to the co-existence of fragmented yet emancipatory human rights rationales that center questions of economic self-determination. In exploring underlying justice logics reproduced through human rights governance rationales by drawing on Mahmood Mamdani's conceptualization of justice responses in conjunction with Tendayi Achiume's work on neocolonial interconnection, it advances often overlooked questions of socio-economic self-determination and structurally induced precarity in debates on human rights in borderwork.