Conclusion: Preventing Death by Sovereignty

Abstract

Yaguine Koita and Fodė Tounkara did not have the opportunity to present their polite request to European leaders. Their terrible deaths illustrate in dramatic fashion the structural violence that prevents large populations from the Global South from ‘realizing their actual potential’. The violence of borders is most immediately apparent in the boys’ fatal choice of transportation. Borders, and the inequalities they help to sustain, are also implicated more broadly in the conflict and poverty Yaguine and Fodė were seeking to escape and their desperation to ‘become like’ Europeans. Crossing borders is not the only solution to urgent problems of human security. Other solutions, based on genuine projects of peacemaking and development,¹ or the regulation of global capital, would no doubt produce more widespread and sustainable results, and would probably be a preferred option for many. On the other hand, increases in social and economic opportunity have been found to enhance rather than curtail the desire to cross borders, which points to the role of individual agency and casts doubt on the efficacy (as well as the ethics) of using development as a tool of migration regulation. We contend that, in a globalizing age, disrupting the global hierarchy of mobility with the goal of making legal border crossing open to all who need it presents itself as a key imperative for a politics of global justice.

No shift in the way we think can be more critical than this: we must put people at the centre of everything we do. No calling is more noble, and no responsibility greater, than that enabling men, women and children, in cities and villages around the world, to make their lives better. Only when that begins to happen will we know that globalization is indeed becoming inclusive, allowing everyone to share its opportunities. We must do more than talk about our future, however. We must start to create it, now.

Statement by Kofi Annan in UN Millennium Report (UN, 2000, p. 7)

Your excellencies, EU members and leaders,

We have the great pleasure and confidence to write to you to discuss our suffering, the suffering of children and young people from Africa and the objective of our trip … if you see that we sacrifice ourselves and risk our lives, it is because we suffer too much in Africa and we need you to fight against poverty and end the war in Africa. Nevertheless we want to study, and we ask you to help us study to become like you in Africa.

Extract from a letter (translated from the French) found in the belongings of Yaguine Koita and Fodė Tounkara from Guinea, who died in the undercarriage of a plane travelling to Brussels in 1999, aged 15 and 14 (Migreurop, 2009, p. 117)