In the shadow of law: navigating ECOWAS free movement law in West African borderlands

This paper explores how cross-border mobility is governed at the legal and institutional margins of West African states. These borderlands lie at the intersection of overlapping regulatory regimes and normative orders, including national migration law, ECOWAS free movement protocols, and local mobility norms. Departing from conventional approaches that focus on formal state institutions and migration policy, the paper adopts the lens of legal borderlands to examine how mobility is shaped by plural, informal, and often contradictory governance practices in legal spaces located at the edge of state authority. West African borderlands have been described as lawless areas or legal grey zones where movement is structured primarily through social networks. Yet these borderlands are far from legal voids. Rather, they are legally saturated environments where governance is enacted through the everyday practices of immigration officers, traders, brokers, smugglers, and travellers. Law and regulations are, in these contexts, not simply imposed from above, but negotiated, adapted, and contested through local interactions that both reinforce and undermine formal governance frameworks. Based on ethnographic research, including interviews, focus groups, observations, and informal interactions, conducted between October 2024 and October 2025 in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and in the border towns of Elubo (Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire) and Aflao (Ghana?Togo), the paper unpacks the complexity of legality and illegality in cross-border mobility governance in West African borderlands. By advancing the concept of legal borderlands, the paper unpacks situated practices of everyday migration governance and shows how cross-border mobility in West African borderlands is co-produced through everyday interactions in legally plural and institutionally fragmented spaces at the margins of the state.