ABSTRACT
While the Maghreb countries have a longstanding history of migration to Europe, the West African migration ow towards the North is a more recent phenomenon, coinciding with the consolidation of the European Union. Transit migration through the Sahara is a large-scale collective experience that is best understood, perhaps, in its systemic dimension. Highly adjustable, these movements have generated prolic operational networks, systems of information, and social organization among fellow migrants as well as interaction with local populations. In the current discussions on matters of security, border, and migration management, the relationship between Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa is being renegotiated. There is an open struggle between disciplining mobility and the desire for migratory self-determination that lies at the heart of the current geopolitics regarding human circulation, a tendency that comes into sharp prole in this geography. If we want to begin to understand the profound impact this intense mobility has on the region, we need to apprehend it as a eld of dynamic relations, a geography traversed and transformed by life in motion.
