Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Niger’s status as a ‘hub’ for West African migration is now cemented in the imaginaries of interveners and global observers. Even as the number of migrants transiting the country falls sharply from a peak in 2015, the policies and practices on the part of the Nigerien government, its local partners, and international actors, continue to coalesce around irregular migration as a major security priority. This mostly repressive approach to irregular migration has had knock-on effects on livelihoods in Northern Niger, where the bulk of the economy around transiting migration is rooted. While the story of criminalization and securitization in Niger is a well-worn one, there is less attention to some of the ways these processes are incremental, erratic, incomplete, ambiguous, and contested. This article argues that once we consider the voices of market insiders in the smuggling economy alongside those in the security and intervention sector, these narratives point to the fundamentally ambiguous status of the migration economy between the licit and illicit, the legal and the illegal. To capture this ambiguity, the article draws on the concept of quasilegality, which captures the in-between status of the flows in question, and in particular the conceptual space between the licit/illicit and legal/illegal binaries. Quasilegality points to three salient factors in contesting the straightforward narrative of criminalization in Niger: a gap between the social acceptability of smuggling and state legal frameworks, the ambiguity of the state legal framework and its application, as well as market insiders’ own understanding of their activities. The article’s attention to narratives around migration, crime, and (in)security in Niger is at once a means of complicating the smoothness of security and control as well as a broader critique of views of migration in Niger that would see it as a straightforward example of ‘transnational organized crime’ in West Africa.

This article theorizes about how individual factors and network effects interact with each other in ways relevant to the study of networks generally, but in particular of criminal networks. In modern network analysis, careful technical descriptions that involve important graph-theory measures are entirely sensible, but they often ignore specific details about the individuals within the network. For study of a human social system, to ignore qualities of the actors is to risk an incomplete, possibly spurious, explanation, so individual-level factors may be important for a more complete understanding of the system. In covert and criminal networks, actors have motivations to keep some activities from public view, so it is impossible to understand such networks without appreciating at least that individual-level intention. This article describes five different levels of effects, both individual and relational, relevant to network-based social systems, and explains how these effects may interact. Important implications for the study of criminal networks include the formation of trust within networks, the exercise of control, and the identification of network brokers. A richer description of individual action within a complex social system will require better knowledge about how personality, social identity and other psychological factors are distinct from, and yet may interact with, self organizing network processes.

This article looks at the discourses regarding Nigerian confraternities’ expansion to Europe. It analyses how networks of individuals working together for solidarity, economic or political objectives became categorized as organised crime or as a mafia. I use original data and police investigations, interviews with members and victims, judges, police officers, and journalists to show how the work of French and Italian institutions led to the emergence and transformation of discourses regarding the “Nigerian mafia” which, in the context of the 2015 migration crisis, came to designate confraternities. The circulation of these categories and frames cannot only be accounted for by the work of state institutions, but needs to be analysed through the sociology of information production and practices, which explains the effects of circular reporting, imposition of frames and narratives coming directly from investigations on criminal issues instead of other approaches to Nigerian migration.