As African migrants continue to endure deadly voyages across the
Mediterranean, efforts to curb this flow have centred on countries like Niger
through which they transit.

Along with irregular migration, Niger is a trafficking hub for a
range of substances both benign (subsidised food) and illicit (cocaine).
Contemporary approaches to security in the broader Sahel tend to consider
various forms of trafficking, defined in myriad ways, as a major threat to
state security and regional stability. The European Union’s integrated approach
to the region sees terrorism
and trafficking as inextricable. At the same time, the G5
Sahel regional group (and its international funders) consider “illicit
flows” to be a key threat necessitating military
and police cooperation. At first glance, Niger sits at the heart of the central
Sahel that is supposedly crisscrossed by informal flows of drugs, migrants, and
other goods. Yet the story of forms of trafficking are not so simple: these
undermine the state’s security institutions but sustain the resilience of
social and economic systems. This double-edged nature of trafficking in Niger
suggests that efforts to curtail it, including well-funded international
interventions, can be effective on their own terms all while being
counterproductive for security.

Trafficking in northern Niger is a catch-all description of a
wide range of flows. Most notable of these are the thousands of migrants from
the sub-region who have passed through Niger on the way to North Africa. Niger
has become known as a ‘transit state’ for migration to Europe, an
identity that the state has embraced as a
means of directing international attention and resources to its security
apparatus. The country has seen numerous seizures
of drugs, including cocaine presumably headed
north. The state understands these phenomena as elements of the umbrella term trafics. The ambiguity of this term in French — which can include benign
smuggling as much as violent trafficking — adds obscurity to the linkages
between disparate flows such as those of drugs and migrants. International
partners such as the EU tend to go along with this framing. This is not a
consensus view, and a range of social forces such as local NGOs in Niger
present strong arguments in favour of free movement of people and the
protection of migrants. In the northern city of Agadez, a hub for migration
flows, traffickers themselves have formed
a union to argue against a repressive approach to
‘trafficking’. The framing of trafficking as a threat is neither uniform nor
readily accepted in all sectors.

Trafficking in northern Niger is a catch-all description of a wide range of flows. Most notable of these are the thousands of migrants from the sub-region who have passed through Niger on the way to North Africa.

The rejection of a security-first view of trafficking in Niger
is partly due to the illicit economy’s function as a safety valve in the
country. Northern Niger is home to major smuggling routes, which have evolved
over time and only recently faced growing criminalization by the state. Many of
the traffickers of today are the rebels and tourist guides of yesterday, whose
informal employment staves off an otherwise precarious existence. A recent
report by the International Crisis Group, Managing Trafficking in Northern Niger,
vividly illustrates the ways that politics blends with the illicit economy to
act as a counterintuitive rampart against insecurity. The report points to the
ways that key actors in the trafficking economy can “double-hat” as both politicians
and traffickers, which disincentivizes the recourse to violence. This is a
potential peril, however, as the criminalization of the state is an
ever-present risk if actors from the illicit economy play such a direct role in
it or bypass normal channels to access key actors.

State responses to trafficking have not prioritised
accommodation straightforwardly. The vision of trafficking as a threat, rather
than a factor for peace, prevails in many parts of the state. The 2015
law banning human smuggling in Niger was
passed with some external (EU) pressure and aligns Niger with its obligations
under the Palermo Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Ongoing
research shows that most actors in Agadez involved in the migration economy
concede that the 2015 law has played the largest role in the decline of
migration numbers in the region. While this is a policy success of sorts, it
has made desert migration routes more circuitous dangerous and expensive. Such
clampdowns on trafficking also have deeply perverse effects, including the incubation
of private violent solutions to smuggling. In 2017, a group at the Libya-Niger
border seized on some EU states’ willingness
to rely on militias to stem migration in
the Sahara by launching various highly publicized, armed border control
operations with often militarized codenames.

One of the reasons for this hot and cold approach to trafficking is that there are competing visions of state capacity in Niger.

One of the reasons for this hot and cold approach to trafficking
is that there are competing visions of state capacity in Niger. On the one
hand, intelligence gleaned from traffickers crisscrossing the desert reinforces
the state’s ability to ‘see’ other security threats such as terrorist
infiltration by groups such as the Islamic
State in the Greater Sahara. On the other, traffickers
can quickly form alternative bases of power that challenge the state. The term
‘state capacity’ may appear to be a trope, yet divergences on its
interpretation produce tangible impacts on the approach to trafficking. However,
the need to manage mobility and economic life in the hinterlands (rather than
directly govern it) speaks to the challenges of large Sahelian states with
limited money and human resources. The outsourcing of governance, especially in
borderlands, is nothing new — think of Mali even before the 2012 crisis.
However, international pressures push in the other direction, through the
reinforcement of state agencies tasked with pushing back traffickers. One such
unit, an EU-funded rapid action group of Nigerien gendarmes focused on border
control and anti-trafficking, has become
a target for insurgents. Niger faces security pressures on
multiple fronts and the paradox that both trafficking and efforts to fight it
may erode its capacity to cope.

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