Introduction

1An actress in a khaki uniform playing a police officer empties a backpack belonging to a man who is kneeling next to his motorbike, his arms behind his head. The audience, who are mostly children from the village, holds its breath (figure 1). Medication, drugs and other illegal items are scattered on the ground. The policewoman drags the culprit off the stage that the dusty area in front of the radio station has become. The audience applauds, and the young members of the music collective, who had earlier performed a dance and a song about the dangers on the Senegalese borders, return to the stage with posters from the IOM-UN Migration Agency. The prints feature messages and pictures about “community engagement” and “collaboration”, showing examples of good practices that local residents in the border regions are supposed to adopt: report any kind of suspicious behaviour; cross borders only at official border crossing points; be aware of Jakartamen (drivers of motorcycle taxis) who transport drugs; and trust the national security and defence forces.

2This was only a rehearsal. The next day, at the official performance, representatives of the security and defence authorities would introduce themselves and their tasks to the residents and answer any questions they might have. As an intern and research fellow at the Immigration and Border Management team (IBM) of the IOM-UN Migration Agency in Dakar, I helped pack up the material and climbed into one of the 4x4s that would take us to the neighbouring villages, where we would continue with the “Rural Communities Engagement in Border Security and Management in Senegal” programme. This also included other awareness-raising components such as alphabet primers for children and a presentation of a study on the residents’ perception of issues in the border regions.

3All these materials – posters, plays and primers – raised awareness of similar threats and possible crises, ranging from daily dangers at the borders such as the drug trade, cattle theft, child abduction and illegal logging to more perilous catastrophes involving the mass displacement of people, epidemics and more. In the IBM report, the border became the place where many dangers converged:

The political instability of certain African countries, the outbreak of international terrorism and the phenomenon of religious radicalization (particularly among young populations), various forms of illicit cross-border trafficking, epidemiological and pandemic risks, and the smuggling of people and goods directed governments’ attention towards their borders, their first line of security, and further engaged them in securing and managing their national borders. (IOM, 2016: 7)

4As Frowd argues, states in West and North Africa are “typically seen as ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ countries for irregular migration, and the Sahel region they straddle is widely perceived as an emerging haven of terrorist activity” (2014: 226). Looking at the migration-development-security nexus in West Africa, Deridder et al. suggest that “migrants, terrorists, and people in a state of precarity seem to have merged into one single threatening figure of Otherness” (2020: 11). In turn, this conflation has resulted in growing attention being paid to border security (Brachet, 2016), as further exemplified by an increase in international and national border management activities in West and North Africa. In the case of Mauritania, Frowd (2014) traces this new emphasis on border security back to 2005, while Brachet (2016: 272) shows how similar dynamics in North Africa gained momentum with the displacement of people during the Libyan war in 2011. Although scholars are noting the increasing role of public-private companies in the control of mobility in West Africa, many have also contextualised the EU’s commodified mobility policing in historical terms by tracing historical continuities since early French colonialism (Stambøl and Jegen, 2022: 76).

5In Senegal, the border community engagement programme implemented by the IOM-UN Migration Agency is part of a range of activities that have the objective of contributing to a territorial meshing (maillage territorial) that will make borders impervious. By homing in on the important role residents and local village actors might play in securing the national territory, the border management team hoped to improve the relationship between communities and authorities, to instil a sense of responsibility among civilians with regard to protecting the borders and ultimately engage the residents in making frontiers secure.

6I ask what preparing for a crisis by territorial meshing means in concrete terms, and discuss the various components of the programme, which include theatre performances, the inauguration of cultural houses of citizenship and neighbourliness (cases culturelles de citoyenneté et de bon voisinage) and an exercise that simulates a mass displacement in the Senegalese border regions. More specifically, I explore how these programmes, institutional actors and local communities shape and perform this territorial meshing in border zones and crisis situations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Senegal and Mali in 2019, including a six-month internship at the IOM-UN Migration Agency, where I also conducted interviews with the staff, I show how surveillance is neither the sole responsibility of the state or government bureaucracy nor simply within the purview of international organisations (Donovan et al., 2016: 34). Instead of just focusing on the externalising aspect of border controls (for a recent discussion, see Cold-Ravnkilde, 2022), I concentrate on how a border culture of care and control is fostered by interactions between state and non-state actors, and how this culture aims to cultivate observation, surveillance and suspicion among local residents as a distinct mode of governance.

7My focus is therefore not so much on the phenomena that various national and international governmental mechanisms claim to be combatting, but more on what this diverse range of practices means on the ground, at the same time moving away “from sensational, headline-grabbing moments to the prosaic rhythms and negotiations around surveillance” in West Africa (Donovan et al., 2016: 31-32). I concentrate less on the technological, biometrical side of securitisation (Awenengo Dalberto and Banégas, 2021; Breckenridge, 2005, 2014; Debos, 2018, 2021; Frowd, 2017) and the remote surveillance and control (Andersson, 2016) that are part of other border management activities. Instead, I focus on the fostering of a border control culture (see also Zaiotti, 2011, or what Frowd has called “borderwork”, 2018, following Rumford, 2008) that highlights the civilian and national(ising) side of securing borders through practices that rely on the separate notions of preparedness and prevention. Unlike the concept of prevention, where the aim is to avert or counteract a disaster before it happens, preparedness assumes that the moment of crisis or disaster will inevitably happen in the future, and is thus centred around “what to do when it does” (Revet, 2020: 162; see also Collier and Lakoff, 2008; and Samimian-Darash, 2016). In this project, I argue that preparedness and prevention were seen jointly as a “matter for specialists” and a “local matter” requiring regional knowledge of current and historical cross-border mobilities, as well as local awareness of which uncontrolled or unauthorised points of entry were being used, and by whom, and what or who was considered suspicious (Revet, 2020: 167; see also Enria, 2020: 388). By engaging ethnographically with these territorial meshing practices, I highlight the tension between their emphasis on local ownership and the involvement of affected communities (Enria, 2019, 2020). At the same time, I demonstrate how the spaces and temporalities of preparedness and prevention are standardised in this process. It is especially in the crisis simulation exercise, which I discuss in the third part, that the standardised geography of spatial itineraries and the distribution of kits fully emerges. This points to how, despite local adaptations, these exercises are being replicated as transposable standards or travelling models (Behrends et al., 2014; Keck and Lachenal, 2019: 34; Olivier de Sardan et al., 2017) to combat similar threats across regions. In the next section, I will briefly introduce the Immigration and Border Management (IBM) project and discuss what it means to do research in an international institution.

Knowledge production in an international institution

[…] remote communities removed from central powers living under difficult conditions should not be made to feel abandoned and left to their own devices. This could promote a turn toward social unrest and deviance among young people who are particularly susceptible to dangerous extremism. (IOM, 2016: 34-35)

9This was a part of the results IBM’s multiple-choice surveys in different regions across Senegal had yielded. In 2015, the team carried out a study to assess local communities’ perceptions of the Mauritanian border, and carried out a second study of the Southern Senegalese regions of Sédhiou, Kolda, Tambacounda, and Kédougou in 2017. Designed and elaborated by the border management team, which included a Senegalese sociologist, and in coordination with national and traditional authorities, the study gathered information on socio-economic aspects and the communities’ perceptions of (in)securities. It mapped the civilians’ understanding of potential border threats and the role of security and defence forces and how they cooperated with civilians.

10I arrived at the IBM office after the surveys had been distributed, collected and evaluated, but in time to become involved in organising and presenting the results to the authorities and community stakeholders. As an intern, I was responsible for contributing to the implementation of the project and its field missions and meetings, such as tabletop and field crisis simulation exercises, the community awareness campaign, evaluating activities and writing reports. Several scholars who have studied international institutions have noted how doing research at IGOs while being part of a team – in my case as an intern – can be difficult to navigate (Billaud, 2014; Billaud and Cowan, 2020; Halme‐Tuomisaari, 2018; Niezen and Sapignoli, 2017). One becomes aware of differences in interests, the making and unmaking of alliances, internal criticism and informal exchanges, and, as Niezen and Sapignoli have highlighted, one is also privy “to snippets of conversation, small, accidental insights that accumulate to reveal the complexity, diversity, and irrationality of organizational life” (2017: 3-4). I focus on everyday negotiations and decisions, with the aim – close to Scalettaris’s (2017; see also 2020) – of “generat[ing] knowledge on the internal functioning of a global bureaucracy”, reflecting at the same time on the IOM-UN Migration Agency as a producer of expert knowledge and expertise. From this perspective, it is not only the differences that mark these embedded work/research experiences; the similarities also make an anthropologist’s position and reflective distance a delicate one. The driving logic behind the project under discussion – community ownership – resembled scholarly endeavours that aim to better reflect local legal and social norms and “to understand reasons for mistrust, explore the adaptive potential of cultural practices and learn from existing community-based responses” (Enria, 2019: 1611; Laverack and Manoncourt, 2016). Like the increasing academic interest in “human security” (Balzacq, 2011; Duffield and Waddell, 2006) or “security from below” (Hagberg, 2018), the methodology of the IBM programme sought to describe and analyse how everyday realities were experienced by ordinary citizens and the relevant local social and political actors in the field (Hagberg et al., 2019). By rethinking conventional understandings of forms of security that are usually limited to physical and military security (Buzan and Hansen, 2010), the programme dedicated attention to how citizens perceived the authorities, including how “men in uniform” acted in various localities (Hagberg et al., 2019).

11In the same vein, the IBM team members explained repeatedly that borders are flexible and malleable, echoing many critical border scholars’ conceptualisations of borders as “heterogeneous sociotechnical spaces” in which the “border knowledges” that are produced are “mobile and mutable” (Frowd, 2014: 238). By relying on surveys that produce a specific kind of knowledge, the work of the border management experts therefore came close to that of ethnographers. At the same time, surveys based on multiple choice questions, with the often restricted amount of time spent conducting them, also have their limitations (see for example Biruk, 2018; Halme‐Tuomisaari, 2018). The need to “produce certainty where it does not exist – or, better […] to attempt to arrive at it where it is inherently out of reach” (Niezen and Sapignoli, 2017: 17) often leads to simplifications and the naturalisation of ideas, including homogenous categories such as “community” or what one calls “local” (Enria, 2020: 388; Wilkinson et al., 2017: 3).

12At the workshops at which the findings were presented, the surveys were opened up for further discussion, during which the participants, from representatives of national authorities to local doctors and village chiefs, had the opportunity to add their remarks or challenge the results. The audience often guided the discussions towards security issues they considered to be as important as those mentioned in the surveys. These included problems of enclavement (isolation) and remoteness and the absence of network coverage, as well as a deteriorating road infrastructure. Instead of pointing to an immediate emergency relating to terrorist incidents, the issues discussed suggested a long-standing or “quasi-permanent and structural situation” that questioned the very use or relevance of the category “crisis” (Bonnecase and Brachet, 2013: 6). In some villages, the sense of isolation that was mentioned often resulted in a feeling of being “abandoned by the state”, a situation that can also be linked to the difficult relations between local residents and men in uniform in the region, which have not always been positive and are historically remembered for patronage, corruption and sometimes repression, as outlined in the work on the Senegalese forestry service (Blundo, 2014: 87). Of course, this has to be interpreted in the context of financial and material deprivation, as well as the manifold contradictory pressures for accountability under which state agents operate (Blundo and Glasman, 2013: 4). However, as the participants in the meetings argued, they rarely “saw the state”. At this juncture, the IBM team leader who was presenting the findings turned round, and pointing at the assembled audience, which ranged from representatives of the security, defence and village authorities to citizens’ collectives, exclaimed: “You are the state!” He explained that “the state” was not just located in capitals like Dakar, Paris or Rome, but was in “each and every citizen”. Providing for the security of a country was thus “everyone’s business”. As he put it, making these “porous borders impervious” (étanche) could never be achieved in its entirety, particularly given regional and historical cross-border movements, but by instilling a sense of responsibility in residents to communicate potential threats and suspicious behaviour to the border authorities, one could come closer to this aim.

13The IBM team’s goal was to make the border visible where it was not for the majority of the population by actively involving civilians in borderwork – what Rumford has called “the marking and re-marking of the border by ordinary people” (2012: 899). Instead of taking the concept of border as a “territorially fixed, static, line”, a number of critical border studies scholars have treated it as a dynamic set of practices that produce or sustain not only divisions but also connections (Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2012: 586; see also Côté-Boucher et al., 2014: 197). It was recognised that making borders physically tangible at all levels was impossible, and so the aim was for civilians to internalise the border through a process of fostering a border control culture, as I will explain in more detail below. This attempt at border internalisation through catchwords such as “local participation” and “local appropriation” therefore offers a complementary view to works on European border externalisation (Ould Moctar, 2022; Stambøl and Jegen, 2022: 77).

14One of the key findings of the survey that stood out for the IBM team was that the level of collaboration between local residents and the national authorities was not satisfactory. The fact that the national authorities responsible for carrying out border control and surveillance duties were often perceived as obstructing the communities’ socio-economic interests made cooperation between them more difficult. In many border localities, mistrust, bribes and negative experiences with the police obstructed what the survey participants saw as their daily business, thus conditioning their willingness to cooperate with them in the event of an incident. To remedy this relationship, the IBM project included a number of specific components, some of which targeted communities more directly, while others were expressly meant for police officers. As the next section will demonstrate, those that were geared to communities comprised not only awareness-raising components with pedagogical material and performances, but also more operational activities such as the creation of prevention and citizenship committees. The final section will discuss how the collaboration between the security and defence forces and local communities was put to the test in a simulation exercise in which a crisis was acted out at the border.

Practicing risk and prevention: Cultivating a border control culture

15To address the negative perception of the national authorities and the feeling that the state was absent, the IBM project had organised theatre groups who, as I recounted in my introduction, performed short sketches about dangers along the borders. These sketches showcased how communities should react with the help of national authorities to prevent these threats from turning into a crisis. The performances were not the only events that were also meant to include children, who were seen as important vectors of communication who could pass the lessons on to their families. Comic strips and alphabet primers also caused excitement among pupils, who saw the team arriving at schools along the borders. The comic strip for adolescents illustrated the challenges at the border like those used in the theatre performances, ranging from the consequences of timber trafficking to irregular migration, and the alphabet primer explained (in)security terms in French and Wolof to the younger children.

16Another initiative intended to strengthen border security was the establishment of local prevention and citizenship committees across different villages. Committees like these were often referred to as successful case studies during the Ebola crisis in 2014-2016, when health community committees patrolled the border. As the IBM team told me in interviews, many of the villages had already created committees that were often active during larger events like the Tabaski (Aïd al-Adha in Senegal). In villages that suffered from extensive cattle raiding, these committees also took on more regular night rounds to ensure the safety of their livestock. The IBM team’s focus was on enhancing alertness, surveillance and citizenship, with the objective of defending the villagers’ interests and respect for laws and regulations. As they emphasised, their goal was not to encourage the committees to defend themselves but to urge them to contact and pass information on to the defence authorities who would take over the case. In December 2019, IBM organised a tabletop exercise for the committee around Podor where the focus lay on reinforcing the committee’s reactions to prevent a possible crisis in the border area with Mauritania, and on strengthening communication between committees and the authorities.

17Writing about disaster preparedness activities in Latin America, Revet argues that the purpose of this kind of training is resilience in the form of “being more prepared”, so that communities can “protect themselves” (2020: 165). I argue that its main objective goes further, by seeking to foster increased accountability and responsibility among the targeted local communities as a distinct mode of governance, in a situation in which citizens are seen as active collaborators in the securitisation of borders without necessarily becoming so.

18This civic element of creating active, vigilant citizens was also visible in the construction of cases culturelles de citoyenneté et de bon voisinage (cultural houses of citizenship and neighbourliness) along the borders. Built on the initiative of the Senegalese government, these border houses were meant to strengthen the ties between countries and to institutionalise a “culture of welcome” towards citizens of the neighbouring states. Their symbolic importance became evident during the inauguration of a house between Senegal, Mauritania and Mali in which IBM participated. It consisted of a ceremony with a performance by children and soldiers, as well as local and national political authorities and the civil voluntary workers who had helped build the house, a half-open structure decorated with national emblems and flags, and the playing of the three anthems. The building was presented as part of a political remapping of the “strategic axes” of the region, which were now connected by newly-built roads. Taken together, these border infrastructures acted not only as tools of identification and security but also as an “infrastructure of state visibility” and a source of symbolic capital (Frowd, 2014: 232). In that vein, the border edifices and projects designed and built by IOM-UN Migration and its partners not only had material implications in the form of architecture and equipment but also fulfilled a symbolic role by providing the border guards with more authority.

19Instead of a straightforward militarisation of interventions in the West African region or a focus on biometrical surveillance systems, the prevention of crises at borders goes beyond the training of security and defence forces. It is marked by a shift in responsibility towards the population which makes citizens more “legible” (Scott, 1998). The interventions by IOM-UN Migration emphasised the “[...] development of routines, practices, and mentalities” (Frowd and Sandor, 2018: 74; see also Frowd, 2014) for both sides – citizens and authorities alike – that highlighted good cooperation practices and a common understanding of the threats they had to face together. Abrahamsen and Williams (2010: 220) have argued that new global security assemblages do not weaken state power per se, but that the public and private and the global and local components are rearticulated and reworked. In this vein, I show how the civilian aspect is a form of capital that both the IOM-UN Migration and states mobilise in the security field. Whereas Zaiotti’s work on the “culture of border control” focuses on the border control policy community (2011), in this case the culture extends beyond the training of the police and security community (Frowd, 2018) and is transmitted to citizens with the goal of including them in security practices.

Preparing for the unpreparable: Simulation and the ‘real’ during a border crisis

21As scholars have noted, simulation exercises date back to the Second World War, and were later used to prepare for a potential nuclear attack throughout Europe, Canada and the US during the Cold War (Revet, 2020: 168; Collier, 2008; Elie et al., 2014; Keck and Lachenal, 2019; Lakoff, 2017). While the objective of instilling the need for constant vigilance among the population remains an essential logic of simulation exercises performed today, they are often geared towards specific crises or the intersection of multiple emergencies, from natural disasters and terrorist attacks to outbreaks of epidemics. The objective of the Senegalese-Mauritanian exercise was to test the coordination mechanisms and interventions of the security and health forces, so that the communities saw the police and military forces as an “ally” rather than a threat. It was based on the containment and ordering of circulation in the border space, with regard to not only physical mobility but also the flow of information between the “periphery” – that is, remote borders – and the centre, Dakar, where the national crisis coordination cell was located. The simulation exercise involved a variety of different national and international institutions from local and national authorities, various ministries, intelligence, law enforcement and justice units (figure 3). These institutions also included the national, regional and local crisis coordination centres as well as the counter-terrorism cell and members of the Rapid Action Groups for monitoring and intervention in the Sahel (GARSI).

22The IBM team had designed the simulation scenario, and multiple connected issues had been imagined in the course of writing it. In this “fantasy document”, as Revet (2020: 170) calls it, the landscape, in this case rugged terrain and the Senegal River, played an important role when the scenario and the responses to the crises were being drafted. The displaced populations would have to cross the river in pirogues (boats) and one of the incidents also included the outbreak of an epidemic, a case of child trafficking and a kidnapping. On the first day of the exercise, an explosion set off by the main assailant would make displaced people move from Mauritania to Senegal, and the same scenario would be reversed on the third day, when Senegalese residents playing the displaced victims would have to escape an attack in Senegal and seek refuge on the Mauritanian side. On the second day – in between these two crises – a friendly football match was organised. This was partly intended to ease any possible tensions between the Senegalese and Mauritanian communities and authorities, revealing the exercise’s political character. This was important because of the deterioration of relations between the two states in the 1980s due to a border incident between pastoralists and farmers along the Senegal River (Fresia, 2009). This event had caused unrest in Senegal against Mauritanian nationals, which the Mauritanian government in turn used as a pretext to expel Senegalese nationals, as well as thousands of its own citizens, mainly Haalpulaar who had settled on the banks of the Senegal River (Ould Moctar, 2020). The racialised violence that was associated with the border made the simulation exercise a sensitive endeavour.

23Local inhabitants played the displaced people (around one hundred people volunteered and were bandaged and painted to resemble victims), ten actors from the town were hired to play the most vulnerable people and another few were engaged to help the main perpetrator, who was an IOM-UN Migration employee. Another group composed of citizen collectives, from women to youth groups, had to help the authorities to coordinate their responses. On the one hand, the groups’ tasks related to protection and care such as distributing food, directing the displaced to the securitised spaces, providing psychosocial support and helping with translations, while on the other, they also had to provide relevant information on suspicious people and potential criminals (figure 4).

24To make the exercise more “realistic” and “plausible", the IBM team included elements of surprise in the scenario, such as the interlinking of multiple incidents. In contrast to the activities mentioned above based on prevention, which focuses on the time before threats turn into a crisis, a full-scale simulation exercise, being a practice of preparedness, concentrates on reducing the damage that results from a disaster rather than preventing it (Collier and Lakoff, 2008). Simulations of terrorist attacks are often based on past events – albeit not specific ones – at the same time as they anticipate and premediate possible futures (Samimian-Darash, 2016: 378; Keck and Lachenal, 2019: 31). Here, too, the various planned incidents were intended to occur in the gap between the present and the future (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Krasmann, 2015; Samimian-Darash, 2022). However, as I will show, instead of a “suspension of the present in favour of the future alone” (Samimian-Darash, 2022: 404), the tensions and glitches that arose during the exercise collapsed the virtual future into the present moment, as tensions rose and unplanned concerns emerged.

25The IOM-UN Migration evaluators were familiar with the scenario, but it was not shared with the national security forces before the exercise, which would have rendered the practice meaningless, according to the organisers. The authorities complained that they needed to be more prepared than only participating in one tabletop exercise. The border management team, on the other hand, insisted that this was precisely the aim: having to react to unknown futures and being prepared for the unpreparable. Revet highlights the paradox inherent in the preparation of the unexpected:

The protocols, forms or good practice guides are all designed to “routinize” the extraordinary nature of the coming disaster, in an almost touching attempt to preemptively tame it. Of course, this routine is established by people and professionals – rescue workers, fire fighters, emergency humanitarian workers – for whom disaster is routine, because it is at the heart of their professional activity. It is their accumulated experience and the many repeated difficulties they have encountered over the course of their interventions that lead them (so they say) to produce this norm. (Revet, 2020: 169)

26Nonetheless, the security and defence forces criticised the fact that they did not have the resources to face a mock crisis while also having to perform their normal duties at the same time. During the exercise, this also led to a refusal on the part of some services to perform duties which they did not consider to be part of their responsibilities. The three or four tents the IBM team had ordered to triage victims – “identification”, “health”, “protection” and “distribution” – were not erected because of a disagreement about the delegation of tasks in the case of an emergency. The firefighters did not want to transport the tents from the storage space to the football field that had been designated to shelter the “displaced” people because it was not part of their duties. Not everything went according to plan, in fact, including when it came to the origin of the crisis: the epidemic element and the planned child trafficking case that had been included in the initial scenario had to be left out as they were deemed to be too ambitious.

27This tells us two things. Firstly, it makes us attentive to the fact that these scenarios and exercises are not exempt from various forms of criticism. The tent example, for instance, did not just involve a refusal to adopt the role the scenario expected of the participants: it went to the heart of how they understood their profession. These discrepancies and disagreements also became apparent in other more subtle ways, such as when the participants who were playing victims or perpetrators slipped in and out of their roles. At one moment, a person who was playing a victim could be screaming and the next she was shaking hands with her so-called attacker to congratulate him on his performance while the gendarmes were pinning him down. The moment when actors and volunteers slip out of their roles and turn to irony or distance is what Revet (2020: 178) calls a “minor mode” that challenges the simulation and scenario because it downplays its seriousness.

28The effect of the real, on the other hand, was reinforced by make-up and cotton gauze impregnated with fake blood applied on to the victims’ mock wounds. Expressions such as “lived realities” or “reality on the ground” were constantly employed, but they collided with the often blurred line between practice and an actual crisis. Keck and Lachenal (2019: 36) show how a “standardised tool of de-standardisation” is often introduced into a scenario to disorientate participants and jolt them into action. These elements of surprise, like the examples I have discussed above, played a role in the simulation, but the question of reality also appeared in a different form: there was always the sense that what was being performed might turn into a real emergency. When acting out the kidnapping scene in a hotel, the main perpetrator acted so realistically that some participants became nervous. Others were not feeling well, not because of their role as victims but due to the heat and exposure to the sun. This resulted in moments of unease among the organisers, but it also served as a reminder that the real was never far from the simulation, and was perhaps not kept in check as well as had been believed (Keck and Lachenal, 2019: 36).

29The second element that emerged clearly in the scenario with the tents was the triage spaces they represented, which were to be replicated in a standardised fashion across crisis scenarios. Although the tents were not raised, the authorities recreated the areas they represented: in the identification area, they identified and registered the displaced people and directed them to the next areas such as the health space where healthcare personnel treated injuries; the protection space for children and vulnerable people and the distribution point where participants received standardised emergency kits. As they moved from one location to another, the participants were assigned different identities, from potential attackers to displaced persons and people with varying degrees of vulnerability (figure 5).

30This standardised geography had been rehearsed during the tabletop exercise conducted a week earlier in a large room around tables where the Bakel authorities had to tackle scenarios of several crises and demonstrate how they would handle them and organise the space. In the real-life exercise, this entailed mapping out the town and its key locations in order to be able to guide the displaced people and respond successfully to potential further attacks: a safe itinerary and transport method had to be established from the riverbank where the displaced people disembarked to the cars and buses that carried them to a football field where shelters and a mock morgue had been set up. The security and defence authorities identified additional locations to be secured that one might find in most towns, such as the police station and critical infrastructure and other key places (figure 6). These included hotels and the headquarters of the principal telecommunications provider, from where it would be more difficult to pass on information to the headquarters and national crisis coordination cell if it were to be besieged.

31These standardised spatial itineraries point to an attempt to bring “order to an anticipated (uncertain but likely) disorder that is striking when one observes these exercises” (Revet, 2020: 169). This method of ordering circulation at the border is also partly based on the assumption that people act in irrational ways in a crisis, from panicking to looting. Whereas other scholars have demonstrated that certain scenarios presuppose an inactive population that does not take any initiative (Revet, 2020), the IBM project attempted to foster proactivity among the citizens in line with the slogan on the T-shirts they had received: Engageons-nous pour la sécurité de nos frontières (Let’s work together for the security of our borders). A group of women was encouraged to help with the identification of displaced people, and those who were multilingual were tasked with providing translations or psychosocial support. Youth leaders were responsible for organising the distribution of water sachets and other items, such as the standardised kits.

32IBM’s “hygienic kits” were comparable to Redfield’s MSF humanitarian kits, which he describes as a “portable map of frontline medicine” (2013: 89). They comprised a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, dishwashing liquid and sanitary tissues. Some people questioned the need for these items in a crisis situation, and tensions also arose during the distribution process, which was coordinated by the youth groups. The delegation of these responsibilities created grounds for friction, as only those who took part in the exercise – the security forces and the displaced people wearing a coloured bracelet – were eligible for lunch and a kit. Some participants passed their bracelets on to other people, which meant that not enough kits were available, while others complained that only people from one neighbourhood had been selected to play the victims and were thus allowed to receive food and the kits.

33These critiques, slippages and deviations attune us to the tension between the framework for standardisation that foresees specific materials, technologies and practices to guide the behaviour of populations and national authorities in times of crisis on the one hand, and the divergences and discussions that emerge in these situations on the other. The simulations become performances in which practices are embodied through the repetition and standardisation of procedures, but people may also question them or refuse to carry them out. At the same time, it is these same failures, mistakes and criticisms that became crucial for enabling IOM-UN Migration to identify gaps in training.

34The glitches furthermore also have an impact on how to understand the temporalities of preparedness in simulation exercises are understood. On the one hand, the aim of this full-scale exercise was to regulate and overcome “the time gap between the present and the future event by creating a hypothetical untimely space” corresponding to what Samimian-Darash (2022: 404) has defined as a simulative logic. On the other, the blurred lines between the real and the simulation, which open up spaces for participants and actors to act in unexpected ways, situate the imagined events in a real, unfolding present. Indeed, the scenario was not just adapted and modified on an ongoing basis by the organisers during the planning process to make it more “plausible” according to the organisers; it was also challenged by the participants, who did not follow the preferred responses and reactions as planned. To some extent, this blurs the boundaries between a simulative exercise, in which all actions are written into a plan and followed strictly, and a scenaristic one, which is more open-ended and therefore encourages participants to envisage developments that were not originally included in the script (Samimian-Darash, 2022: 404).

35In addition, the standardisation of kits, spaces and itineraries points to the replicability of the exercise and the circulation of similar simulation models across West Africa and beyond. It was not just the circulation – the physical movement of people in border regions – that was ordered; the models of crisis preparedness circulated in the region too. The relative success of IBM exercises in recent years has often been taken as a transposable model, and the corresponding IBM teams in other offices have adopted them in the respective countries they were located in, including in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Mali. As “travelling models” developed by international experts and introduced in an almost identical format across numerous countries (see Behrends et al., 2014; Olivier de Sardan et al., 2017), the exercises were rapidly implemented also beyond the West African region, such as Tanzania. The team always highlighted that the various emergency plans were adapted to the different countries, for example, the police and defence forces were organised differently in The Gambia than in Senegal because of the different French and British colonial administrations from which they had inherited their policing and administrative models. Yet the spatial organisations, identifications, key tasks and procedures of the exercises often remained the same.

Conclusion

36In this case, preparing for the next crisis and contributing to a territorial meshing meant not only readying material infrastructures such as physical border posts and houses of citizenship and neighbourliness, but also fostering a security community and border culture that mobilised the entire local population. This was done regardless of age, as the young children who received alphabet primers with security terms were seen as an important link for transmitting the messages and lessons to their families. The residents of the various border localities were supposed to take a proactive stance, in constant coordination with the authorities in the securitisation of their national borders, including through the prevention and citizenship committees. In the context of self-defence movements in the region such as the Koglweogo in Burkina Faso and violent incidents, the IBM team stressed that the aim was to provide their prevention committees with safe training that placed the emphasis on logistical means of communication to alert the relevant authorities while also explicitly prohibiting the use of arms. However, the proliferation of vigilante groups in rural areas that are often perceived to be short of “gendarmeries, police stations, and more broadly speaking of public services, but also in the purported leniency of law enforcement and lawmakers in dealing with theft in particular” (Da Cunha Dupuy and Snow, 2021: 280) should not be underestimated, and is a delicate matter.

37While the activities such as plays, primers and committees followed a temporal logic of risk and prevention that focused on how to avert or counteract a disaster before it happened, the simulation exercise based on preparedness focused on when it happened. It made the crises more tangible by folding an imagined future into the unfolding present. All these components were aimed at producing a distinct mode of governance that would instil a sense of civic responsibility in citizens who perceived the state as absent. International institutions saw themselves as attempting to fill a void that was expressed by these communities, not by replacing state responsibilities but by arguing that it was the citizens’ own duty and concern to secure their frontiers, thereby highlighting the notion of resilience. Citizens were thus bound together not only by having to prepare for common risks or emergencies but also around the idea that they bore part of the responsibility for providing the associated forms of safety and security in borderscapes marked by everyday mobilities. In this political process of territorial meshing of the border zones, the concept of emergency conveyed by the materiality and performance of IOM-UN Migration borderwork stands in tension with the more chronic issues noted by the residents. At the same time, discrepancies between how these crises were imagined and ultimately executed also arose, leaving space for criticisms, rejections and deviations that called the standardisation and efficacy of these models into question.

This research project was part of ANTHUSIA, a multi-disciplinary research project in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 764546. I would like to thank all the participants of the project and the members of the IBM team for giving me the opportunity to work with them and for providing feedback on this article. I am grateful to Marie Deridder and Anaïs Menard for their comments during the workshop and panel “Reinventing circulations at times of ‘crisis’ in West Africa” at the APAD conference in 2020, and to Tanja Hendriks and Cecilie Baan for comments on earlier drafts. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.