ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the context of high-risk migration and restrictive mobility regimes, with a particular focus on life after deportation to Ghana. It argues that the concept can usefully be combined with Hage's thoughts on social hope and hence a focus on how only migrants but also states and other actors create, sustain, and govern topographies of societal or other kinds of social hope. Examining the tension between state and local topographies of hope among deportees allows me to explore how the different modalities of hope and the good life are related to high-risk migration and deportation. The implication is that high-risk migration to places like Libya remains an element in the local topographies of hope in places like Amanfo, at least partly because of the lack of a convincing alternative. The word ‘topography’ is evocative in terms of implying distances and the density of imagined or experienced opportunities and stagnation, constituting ‘mental’ maps of places.
